It's never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to re-create life. Life's Edge is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could craft. 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. 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 is to locate life’s edge.Ĭarl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. “Stories that both dazzle and edify… This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself.” -Siddhartha Mukherjee, New York Times Book Review WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD***A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021***A SCIENCE NEWS FAVORITE BOOK OF 2021***A SMITHSONIAN TOP TEN SCIENCE BOOK OF 2021

Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer