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How Life Works
A User’s Guide to the New Biology
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Brief Description
In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many...
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See moreDrawing on recent discoveries and insights, How Life Works outlines a new vision of our understanding of life for the 21st century.
Drawing on recent discoveries and insights, How Life Works outlines a new vision of biology for the 21st century. Now in B format.
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Description
In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).
With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781529096002
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 06 March 2025
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Picador
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 40.0mm
Width: 131.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 382g
Pages: 560
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About the Author
Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Modern Myths, The Book of Minds, and How Life Works. He lives in London.
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