The machinery of life - 2. ed.

What Hacker News says

1. ORDINAND_PIZZAOct 2026
   here's more captivating illustrations of cells and cellular mechanisms from David Goodsell (some of his pictures are used in the OP's article). i simply love his style and sense of color.

   https://ccsb.scripps.edu/goodsell

   i've read and can highly recommend his book The Machinery of Life for a patient and visual explanation of these baffling machines!

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2. jll29Aug 2026
   One take-away: At the very least, each school library schould provide:

   • Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

   • David Goodsell, The Machinery of Life

   • William W. Cohen, A Computer Scientist’s Guide to Cell Biology

   • Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology

   • Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher

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3. ofrzetaApr 2026
   Looks fascinating. Related: The Machinery of Life https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-84925-6 (actually it is the book of the person who drew the first illustration in the article but I could not see any mention of the book).
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4. da-baconApr 2026
   Two books that I highly recommend to give you a visual and numbers view of the cell:

   “The Machinery of Life” by David Goodsell is full of illustrations like the ones show in the article and really gave me a sense of what k might imagine when reading about the cell.

   “Cell Biology by the Numbers” by Ron Milo and Rob Philips is full of order of magnitude calculations of about the processes of the cell. How fast are they, over what distance, how much, etc.

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5. shpxApr 2025
   The Machinery of Life by David Goodsell. It's a short book with beautiful diagrams and explanations of microbiology.

   The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Its thesis is that everything is built up of smaller things that are all trying to replicate or get replicated.

   Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I haven't read the book, but reading about the book's argument that language is a type of multiplayer game, along with the aforementioned ideas about things being built out of smaller things that are trying to replicate changed how seriously I take ideas in general. I'm not looking for a universal truth anymore, I'm watching different collections of ideas compete with each other based on how well they replicate and how well they compete once they've entered a brain.

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6. frereubuApr 2025
   The post by James Somers that this article references at the top inspired me to buy the David Goodsell book The Machinery of Life. I would seriously recommend that to anyone who doesn't have a background in biology (like me). The phrase is a bit of a cliché, but it genuinely blew my mind, to the extent that I had to read it slowly because there's so much fascinating stuff packed into such a small book. It's obvious to me now, but the fact that so much of this stuff is about physical shapes locking into each other, and doing it at an almost unimaginable speed, was absolutely enthralling.
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