to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies. If that’s as clear to your ears as a morning hello, have I got a book for you! Unfortunately, it’s not to me: The tour of the chem lab during my high-school orientation included an eyewash station to save your sight from an errant spray of acid and a furled blanket with which you could smother yourself in case you caught fire. I’ve given chemistry a wide berth ever since. Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) are such vital physiological signals that cells go out of their way to keep ROS flux within tight physiological limits. Redox tone – the balance of electron sources and sinks in a cell – is as critical to homeostasis (our normal chemical balance) as temperature or acidity. Any damage to the respiratory chain will tend to increase ROS flux. What does Lane say is the best thing we can do to have long healthy lives? You’d never guess. Eat a modest quantity of healthy food and stay active. 🙂 But be aware, there’s a large element of chance in health.

Although I love this book, it does inevitably suffer part way through from the problems of a biology book being read by non-biolog of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universallyLane seems firmly established in the scientific establishment — he’s a professor at University College London — but his book carries a whiff of the heretic. He’s glad that “the simplistic notion that genes control metabolism is beginning to unravel” but frustrated that “the idea that mutations cause cancer remains the dominant paradigm”— a paradigm that, to his mind, is “too close to dogma.” He also states plainly: “I want to turn the standard view upside down.” After reading this book, one will understand how this cycle of matter (eponymously named in the 1930s after Sir Hans Adolf Krebs) is a sound explanation for the origin of life, lifespan, and the end of life. You will learn how the whole beautiful process can be understood in terms of physical chemistry, which is a unique sweet spot in the massive space of possible scientific explanations. It is a remarkable story. Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected

Even though nonscientists won’t be able to judge whether Lane makes a convincing case, he is periodically quite clear on his goals. Early on, he posits the essential question as “genes first or metabolism first? The thrust of this book is that energy is primal — energy flow shapes genetic information.” Later, he restates the proposition with added whimsy: Unlike most popular science books, this one is short on “wow factor”— information amazing enough to wake up the non-specialist nodding off amongst the molecules. But it does reveal that we’re each made of up “at least 30 trillion cells,” all of which go through “a billion metabolic reactions every second.” That means the cells of a man in his mid-50s like the book’s author have already gone through reactions numbering 10 to the 32nd power, “roughly a billion times the number of stars in the known universe.” ageing, related diseases and cancer newly explained as consequences of slowing and reversing the Krebs cycle National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the Lane notes that "cancer is a disease of the genome is too close to dogma." Different mutations are found in different parts of many tumours, often with little if any overlap, implying that the mutations accumulated during the growth of the tumor, rather than triggering its inception. Moreover, the same oncogene mutations are often found in normal tissues surrounding a tumor,

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A living cell and one that just died have the same DNA. Put differently, both cells have precisely the same information content. Just as the flow of people and goods, rather than the arrangement of the buildings, determines that a city is alive, the fluxes of metabolites and energy characterise a living cell. Modern biology is often solely discussed in terms of information. In "Transformer", Lane argues that metabolism is at least as important. This viewpoint of "follow the goods" is also emphasised on a completely different scale by Vaclav Smil in "How the World Really Works". Lane has come to believe that the structure of cells is less important than what goes on within them, an idea with both theoretical and practical implications. It challenges the accepted theory of life on Earth emerging from a “primordial soup” on the planet’s surface and instead shifts the genesis to undersea thermal vents. It replaces the buildup of genetic mutations as the cause of aging and cancer with the slowing of cellular activity. And it imagines consciousness as the humming electrical fields of cell membranes. In glycosis, pyruvate is converted to lactate, allowing the cell to produce small amounts of ATP in the absence of oxygen. Warburg noted the propensity of cancers to ferment glucose in the presence of oxygen. However, many cancers don’t depend on aerobic glycolysis at all, normal tissues are also capable of aerobic glycolysis, and stem cells typically depend on ATP from aerobic glycolysis for their energy needs. The chances of life starting on an oxygenated planet are arguably close to zero: hydrogen must react with CO2 to form organic molecules, but does so very reluctantly if at all in the presence of oxygen Some interesting observations: the Cambrian explosion was when the Krebs cycle was first used primarily to generate energy not biosynthesis, taking advantage of the increased oxygen available. Rubisco in plants is considered inefficient as it does not adequately distinguish oxygen from carbon dioxide, but this may be necessary to prevent oxidative damage. People with type II diabetes have double the risk of Alzheimer’s, which is increasingly looking like a metabolic disease to Lane and others.

Also interesting was that many of our diseases, like cancer, are caused more by respiration problems than genetic problems. At the heart of life is an amazing, conflicted merry-go-round of reactions called the Krebs cycle. This might seem like stuffy textbook biochemistry from decades ago, but it holds the secret to what brings a planet to life and our own lives to an end.This is probably the best book on biology (and more specifically biochemistry) that I've ever read.