Life's Edge
The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
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Life's Edge
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Narrated by:
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Joe Ochman
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By:
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Carl Zimmer
About this listen
'Profound, lyrical, and fascinating, Life’s Edge will give you a newfound appreciation for life itself. It is the work of a master science writer at the height of his skills.' – Ed Yong, author of An Immense World
We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world – from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses – the harder they find it to locate the edges of life, where it begins and ends. What exactly does it mean to be alive? Is a virus alive? Is a foetus?
Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts – whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.
Life’s Edge is a fascinating investigation by one of the most celebrated science writers of our time. Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr Frankenstein’s monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.
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Critic reviews
This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself. It is about error and hubris, but also about wonder and the reach of science. And it is bookended with the ultimate question: How do we define the thing that defines us? (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene)
What listeners say about Life's Edge
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Eoin leen
- 05-12-21
What is life, revisited.
As a working biochemist I, long ago, gave up on any kind of definition of life. I had read Ernst Schrodinger's "What is life?", which is very interesting but gets nowhere close to answering the question. This is a book which, in a more popular science kind of way, grapples with the same question. It does a great job with the history of the question, describing the debates from antiquity until today. It also describes the challenges in addressing the question. It does this primarily through describing edge cases, things that may or may not be alive. Finally, it outlines the work that attempts to bridge the gap between living and non living. These stories are woven together skillfully, one could say in a way that brings the book to life.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Jj
- 23-09-21
Pretty good
Nice chilled read, nothing complicated and something you can just put down and pick up again with no recap needed. It had great info in it but wasnt very captivated by it like i have with other books the origin story
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Reluctant Sceptic
- 01-02-24
A drudgery of anecdotes well narrated.
Enthusiastically written and performed but ultimately lacking. A tiresome inventory of cool scientific discoveries meandering about the question of what it is to be alive. Not one of my better choices of books on the subject.
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