Book Review: Transformer

 

by Janie
 

Nick Lane
Transformer

The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
ISBN-10: 0393651487

 

Here is a quote from the Hungarian bio­chem­ist Albert Szent-Györgyi: "Life is noth­ing but an elec­tron look­ing for a place to rest." Bold state­ment with a good point, en­cap­sul­ating the ener­getics and chem­istry that under­lies all life.
 

Transformer book cover. Source

This is the angle of view­ing life on Earth that bio­chem­ist and sci­ence writer Nick Lane takes in his book Transfor­mer, a whirl­wind tour of the Krebs cycle and its long­stand­ing sway over our planet's biotic pro­cesses. The open­ing pages argue that the bio­log­ical im­por­tance of chem­ical trans­for­mations has been un­duly over­shad­owed by the swaths of gen­omic infor­ma­tion in the mod­ern digital era and that "the flow of en­ergy and mat­ter through cells struc­tures bio­logical infor­ma­tion rather than the other way around." This is rem­inis­cent of the origins-of-life de­bate bet­ween the genes-came-first camp and the meta­bolism-came-first camp (and the com­part­ment­aliz­ation-came-first camp).
 

Indeed, the book moves from a por­trait of the Krebs cycle and its molecule-level she­nan­igans to a con­sid­era­tion of the cycle's ancient roots, draw­ing chem­ical con­nec­tions that arc ac­ross mil­len­nia. Whether car­bon fix­ation via the rev­erse Krebs cycle or the meta­bolic chem­istry that under­lies all life­forms, carbon is the baton with which life plays relay games, atoms being ferried from one cycle to the next. Stretches of the Krebs cycle could have taken place in the ab­sence of genes and their pro­tein prod­ucts, driven en­tirely by in­org­anic odds and ends like metal ions and sul­fate rad­icals… The story's scope then zooms out to the scale of geol­ogic eras: time is wound back to early Earth. From this pan­ora­mic van­tage point, Lane reasons through how the Krebs cycle may have driven the sweep­ing shifts in Earth's cli­mate and mena­gerie of liv­ing or­gan­isms (this sec­tion is the bio­chem­ical com­panion to another won­der­ful book we've re­viewed on the blog). The focus then shifts to cancer, a disease that is funda­ment­ally more meta­bolic than gen­etic, and finally to aging. It is fascin­ating to see the Krebs cycle as the un­der­cur­rent that relates ancient Snowball Earth to an­aero­bic green sulfur bac­teria to our own life­spans.
 

The book ends with a philo­soph­ical encore: how all this bio­chem­istry ties into what defines "self." Lane muses that the proton-motive force is what de­lin­eates bac­ter­ial cells as in­div­idual entities and is in fact what he con­siders as def­ining the "self." (A ques­tion, then: what of mito­chon­dria?)
 

It's also a book suf­fused with per­sonal­ity. Read­ing about fam­iliar bio­chem­ical pro­cesses through such a dis­tinc­tive and per­son­able voice was a nov­elty to me, and I found even the foot­notes fun to read (these were often com­ment­ary on sci­ence as an in­stitu­tion or scien­tists' quirks). Lane's en­thu­siastic in­ten­tion to make chem­istry "ap­proach­able" is evi­dent in his tend­ency to imbue mol­ecules, atoms, and even bonds with per­sonal­ities, draw­ing com­pari­sons bet­ween mole­cules like py­ruvic acid and the be­havior of people. As a non-chemist, I also ap­pre­ciated the step-by-step dia­grams of how gases may have reacted upon charged sur­faces to form the mol­ecules of life. It's a prism held up to es­sen­tial bio­chem­istry (and more) that I would have ap­pre­ciated in under­grad­uate classes.
 

To (Krebs) cycle back to the start of this post, here is a rel­ated quote from the book: "Met­abol­ism is what keeps us alive – it is what being alive is – the sum of the con­tinu­ous trans­for­ma­tions of small mol­ecules on a time­scale of nano­sec­onds, nano­sec­ond after nano­sec­ond." Here's to see­ing life through met­abolism-colored glasses.