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How Life Works

A User’s Guide to the New Biology

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How Life Works

By: Philip Ball
Narrated by: Philip Ball
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Enticingly read by the author, Philip Ball.

'An essential primer on humanity’s ongoing quest to understand the secrets of life . . . Excellent . . . Ball is a terrific writer.' – Adam Rutherford, The Guardian

A cutting-edge new vision of biology that proposes to revise our concept of what life is – from Science Book Prize winner Philip Ball.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.

In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. 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. 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.

Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the nature of life, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

 Science
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Critics' reviews

Ball is a terrific writer . . . An essential primer in our never-ending quest to understand life (Adam Rutherford, The Guardian)
Ball is a ferociously gifted science writer . . . There is so much [here] that is amazing . . . urgent . . . astonishing
Ambitious and eye-opening
The best biology book I've ever read (Brian Clegg, Popular Science)
A mind-stretching book . . . Ball is a clarifier supreme. It is hard to imagine a more concise, coherent, if also challenging, single volume written on the discoveries made in the life sciences over the past 70 years
Full of fascinating information . . . The dedicated reader will come away with many novel insights and a new perspective on what makes life special
Lucid . . . suggests that before they can understand what really comprises life, biologists have first to unlearn a great deal of what they think they know
Well researched, interesting, and stimulating
Ball deftly explains how it’s possible to follow, in exquisite detail, how cells develop and specialise to form an organism. We are revising life constantly, and Ball’s account of synthetic biology takes us to this exciting frontier
A must-read user's guide for biologists and non-biologists alike . . . It's time to stop pretending that, give or take a few bits and pieces, we know how life works. Instead, we must let our ideas evolve as more discoveries are made in the coming decades (Denis Noble, Nature)
Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep . . . How Life Works has exciting implications for the future of the science of biology itself. I could not put it down (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction)
Ball has the rare ability to explain scientific concepts across very diverse disciplines. . . . He explains the turn away from a purely mechanical view of life to one that embraces the inherently dynamic, complex, multilayered, interactive, and cognitive nature of the processes by which life sustains and regenerates itself (James Shapiro, author of Evolution)
Offers a much-needed examination of exciting, cutting-edge findings in contemporary biology that is likely to dramatically transform our understanding of living systems (Daniel J. Nicholson, coeditor of Everything Flows)
Ball takes glee in tearing down scientific shibboleths . . . and his penetrating analysis underscores the stakes of outdated assumptions. . . . Provocative and profound, this has the power to change how readers understand life’s most basic mechanisms
In showing that complex life is more 'emergent' than 'programmed,' Ball takes on many conventional notions about biology . . . Offers plenty of food for thought for scientists in disciplines from medicine to engineering (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
All stars
Most relevant
I found it extremelly difficult to listen to, because of the in-depth approach of the author/narrator. Maybe the information is easier to understand in a written form

Thourough and well-narrated

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