Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

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In a footnote, the author confides that “probably only a tenth of what I wanted to write about actually made it into the book.” On behalf of humanities majors everywhere, I can only say thank goodness. Amazing! Takes science writing to a new level ... with soaring prose but uncompromising on scientific detail, Transformer made me think about life on earth in a completely different way’

Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformeris Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle—and its reverse—why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today. If that’s as clear to your ears as a morning hello, have I got a book for you! Unfortunately, it’s not to me: The tour of the chem lab during my high-school orientation included an eyewash station to save your sight from an errant spray of acid and a furled blanket with which you could smother yourself in case you caught fire. I’ve given chemistry a wide berth ever since. The great immunologist Peter Medawar said we age because we outlive our allotted time as determined by the statistical laws of selection. This textbook view sees ageing and the diseases of old age as little more than the unmasking of late-acting genes, whose effects do us in. Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected While mutations may cause cancer, particularly in young people, most mutations found in people with cancer arise once the process is underway. The major problem is the decline in respiration efficiency with age; damage may be “caused by protein unfolding or cross-linking, oxidation by ROS or glycation (the tendency of sugars such as glucose to react with proteins and lipids).” ROS stands for reactive oxygen species, free radicals. The ROS signals the cell to slow down respiration to control the ROS. The Krebs cycle intermediate succinate accumulates causing epigenetic changes (so gene activity follows faulty metabolism rather than causing it) and the Krebs cycle sometimes flows in reverse, creating biosynthesis (this was the original direction of the Krebs cycle). The cellular environment now “shouts grow”.Despite my praise of parts of the book, I found it a slow-going read, especially when the author detailed the Kreb’s and other cycles. I am the first one to admit that it is difficult to take a complex subject such as biochemistry and explain it in a text-heavy scholarly medium like a book. Despite the illustrations, which I don’t find all that compelling, it was still difficult to follow, and I had the advantage of already understanding how it all worked. to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally H2 will push its electrons onto the catalyst in alkaline conditions, but CO2 will only accept them from the catalyst in acidic conditions. Virtually all cells pump H+ out, making the outside about three pH units more acidic than the inside. Metabolism is the sum total of reactions occurring in an organism at any one moment. Metabolism keeps us alive—it is what being alive is. In one of our own cells, there are more than a billion metabolic reactions every second. That’s about a hundred billion trillion reactions in the last second, or a billion times the number of stars in the known universe. These reactions don’t all work properly, and damage inevitably accumulates. If all this language sounds like Klingon, that is because this book is really far from an easy read, which can be said for all Lane's books I have seen. He is an excellent writer (albeit prone to digressions), but the topic is so disconnected from other popularized science that it requires a lot of new learning and understanding. It does not help that all claimed rules have many exceptions, leaving me with a fuzzy feeling that I got a glimpse of something great, but cannot dare to make my own conclusions (such as, should I give up my metformin while I follow a ketogenic diet and active lifestyle because it seems to follow from the book outlook applied to metformin-related published papers that metformin acts like a handbrake i.e. that it hinders my progress and increases cancer occurrence risk, while it could help sedentary carb-overloaded persons). The third peculiarity is the genetic code itself. There are clues that hint at direct interactions between the letters in DNA and the amino acids of proteins. This means the code is not random. A random piece of RNA will template a small protein, giving it a sequence that is specified by those non-random interactions. If that speeds up metabolism—the Krebs cycle for example—then the random sequence will be selected. And that means there’s no problem with the origin of information in biology. 3. The first animals evolved through a high-wire metabolic balancing act.

Mitochondrial genes tend to evolve much ten to fifty times faster than nuclear genes, as they are copied far more than nuclear genes, and so they accumulate more mutations. A clean-up process in early life sieves out the most detrimental mutations. That’s why mitochondrial diseases directly affect only about 1 in 5,000 of us. I read several of previous Lane's books, namely Vital Question, Life Ascending and Oxygen. My thinking about origins of life was since dominantly shaped by his work, which filled a major gap for me in my worldview about abiogenesis. To grasp the Krebs cycle is to fathom the deep coherence of biology. It connects the first photosynthetic bacteria with our own peculiar cells. It links the emergence of consciousness with the inevitability of death. And it puts the subtle differences between individuals in the same grand story as the rise of the living world itself. The chemistry in this book is made more accessible by the narrative elements, but it sure as hell (pardon my French) isn't a layperson's level of, let's say high school chemistry. The chemical reactions that he speaks about here are achievable only under very strict laboratory conditions, with the right ingredients, enzymes, and environmental conditions, like pressure and temperature. Or, as it happens, in every one of the cells in our body.