Dr Lane was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is leading the UCL Research Frontiers Origins of Life programme. Dr Lane’s research deals with evolutionary biochemistry and bioenergetics, focusing on the origin of life and the evolution of complex cells. He was awarded the first Provost's Venture Research Prize in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, where he is now a Reader in Evolutionary Biochemistry. Life is at root a chemical phenomenon: this is its deep logic.ĭr Nick Lane is a British biochemist and writer. Enlivened by Lane’s talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer offers an essential read for anyone fascinated by biology’s great mysteries. Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our cells-what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the origin of life. How can the same pathway create and destroy? What might our study of the Krebs cycle teach us about the mysteries of aging and the hardest problem of all, consciousness?
Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse, also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of life on our planet. Lane reveals the beautiful, violent world within our cells, where hydrogen atoms are stripped from the carbon skeletons of food and fed to the ravenous beast of oxygen. Transformer is Lane’s voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle-and its reverse-why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today. Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the “perfect circle” at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight -how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise.
Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end?įor decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information.
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