Lane’s thesis is that biochemists have misunderstood the cycle and therefore underestimated it.

It is named for biochemist Hans Krebs, who described many details of how it works. Its focus is a biochemical process called the Krebs cycle: a whirlwind of chemistry that spins around in all our cells many times a second. In his last book, The Vital Question, he argued that many of these seemingly disparate mysteries could be explained by life’s reliance on electrically charged particles to power itself. One of the most creative of today’s biologists, his work ranges from the evolution of sex and the rise of planetary oxygen to the origin of complex cells and the first life on Earth. Lane’s focus on energy and the essential dynamism of life has been an important thread running through his research. Quoting the poem Like Most Revelations by Richard Howard, he writes that “it is the movement that creates the form”. So argues biochemist and writer Nick Lane in his new book Transformer. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.IF WE want to understand the nature of life, we have to think about the flow of energy and matter. Life is at root a chemical phenomenon: this is its deep logic. Enlivened by Lane's talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone fascinated by biology's great mysteries. How can the same pathway create and destroy? What might our study of the Krebs cycle teach us about the mysteries of aging and the hardest problem of all, consciousness? Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our cells-what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the origin of life. Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse, also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of life on our planet.

Lane reveals the beautiful, violent world within our cells, where hydrogen atoms are stripped from the carbon skeletons of food and fed to the ravenous beast of oxygen. Transformer is 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. 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. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight -how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise.

Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end? For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information.

Transformer nick lane