... elegant, deeply researched ... Zimmer sprinkles his book with stories that both dazzle and edify the reader ... his analysis of virology is succinct but allows for complexity: He acknowledges the debates in the field, and allows the reader an inner glimpse into how scientists are learning to think about these 'borderlands' — microbes that are not alive, but can parasitize the biology of living beings ... Zimmer is an astute, engaging writer — inserting the atmospheric anecdote where applicable, drawing out a scientific story and bringing laboratory experiments to life. This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself. It is about error and hubris, but also about wonder and the reach of science. And it is bookended with the ultimate question: How do we define the thing that defines us?
One has the feeling, while reading this book, of fumbling through the unknown ... the poems of Erasmus Darwin are set alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the chemistry of urea, to fascinating effect. I found myself feeling very grateful that Zimmer had drawn connections among these disparate themes. We biologists are often necessarily narrow in our perspective ... His breadth reveals more of the whole, however blurry, than would otherwise be available to the specialist ... By the end of the book, Zimmer had fully convinced me that the question of what it means to be alive is also best answered according to the purposes for which we ask—and that such inquiries will yield different outcomes depending on how we ask them.
No mere catalogue of errors, Life’s Edge guides us from an abandoned mine in the Adirondacks where bats hang in homeostatic slumber to a California start-up attempting to synthesize RNA-based medications. With these and other examples, Zimmer illustrates why it is so difficult to arrive at a common understanding of where life stops and starts—and how we might one day reach it ... lucid ... The care and precision with which Zimmer maps these complex and challenging issues inevitably prompt another question: Why does it matter how we define life? ... Ultimately, the pleasures of Life’s Edge derive from its willingness to sit with the ambiguities it introduces, instead of pretending to conclusively transform the senseless into the sensible. To read this book is to realize that life’s insistence on fluttering out of our grasp is a consequence of our desire to pin it down like a butterfly on a board.
Zimmer diligently tackles the true definition of life ... Zimmer invites us to observe, ponder, and celebrate life’s exquisite diversity, nuances, and ultimate unity.
By profiling researchers working on these inquiries, Zimmer shows the complexity of reaching a single answer as each proposed definition has its edge cases that provide challenging counter-examples ... A fascinating and well-written mapping of the edges of biology, which will have broad appeal to nonscientists.
Zimmer gives ample space to nitpickers who point out exceptions, and a few chapters record interviews with scientists exploring each of these hallmarks. None answer the author’s big question, but readers will not complain because Zimmer is such an engaging communicator. Confronting a possibly unanswerable question, the author explores its history, an eye-opening review of three centuries of research by intensely curious, obsessive, often obscure scientists who contributed to many revelations about the amazing attributes of life ... An ingenious case that the answers to life’s secrets are on the horizon.
