The cell is, to use Nurse’s memorable expression, biology’s atom. What is life? What is it about life that gives rise to its wonderful diversity and effectiveness, given that living things are built out of the same atoms as all other material objects, obeying the same laws of physics and chemistry? Sir Paul Maxime Nurse FRS FMedSci HonFREng HonFBA MAE image via Wikipedia After a short but important and highly topical chapter on “Changing the world”, the book concludes with a return to the central question. The “five steps” are the cell, genes, evolution, life as chemistry, and life as an information-handling system. I was privileged to hear Sir Paul lecture to Glasgow’s Royal Philosophical Society on the central concepts of biology, and the present book is an exposition and enlargement of the concepts in that lecture. I do have some criticisms, but will reserve these for later. Here he gives a marvellously lucid exposition of highly complex subject matter, in a way that makes difficult ideas accessible to non-expert, while I believe that even the expert will gain from the clarity of overall perspective, as well as from the many illustrations of the scientific process in action, drawn from the author’s own career and elsewhere. The author, Paul Nurse, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the control of the process of cell division, and is currently Director of the Francis Crick Institute in London, and among other things is Chief Scientific Advisor for the European Commission. This short book deserves the widest possible readership.

What is life paul nurse review