Transformer
What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end? For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. 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. 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. 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 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. Yet this same cycle, spinning in reverse, also created the chemical building blocks that enabled the emergence of life on our planet. Now it does both. 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?
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What Hacker News says
- Wonerful! This article is a mind-meld of Humberto Maturana’s work on autopoiesis with almost any of Nick Lane’s deep discussions of bioenergetics e.g., the wonderful book “ Power, Sex and Suicide: Mitochonria and the Meaning of Life” or his equally strong book “Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death” that is focused on the Kreb’s cycle. He brings biochemistry and bioenergetics alive in a way that will impact your thinking.
Maturana and Valera gave a brilliant definition of “living” in Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living” (1980). But their writing style will make this a tough read. Terry Winograd write a useful summary if Maturana’s philosophy in his computer science classic “Computers and Cognition”.
- Michael Levin is coming close to the positions of both Humberto Maturana (autopoiesis) and of Nick Lane (proton pumping).
Autopoiesis is not an easy set of concepts but one of the ideas is that details of structure are much less important that preservation of relationships that allow an entity to replenish its own constituents. Planarian are damn adaptable, but this is hardly news.
Nick Lane emphasizes that DNA is subsidiary to bioenergetics and “proton pumping” across membranes. His recent book “Transformer” focuses on the Kreb’s cycle and mitochondria as the crux of life (and autopoiesis, although he does not use this term).
Lane is extremely readable. Maturana is almost inscrutable.
I enjoined the target article, but am not comfortable boiling down development to “bioelectrics”. A complementary perspective but I do not think this will get us farther than good old developmental molecular biology.
- You might like the book Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death by Nick Lane. (anyone enjoying this comment section would) but specifically he presents some really cool interesting ideas related to this and metabolism
- It's an interesting suggestion but I think given what we know of life it's unlikely. I guess (obviously this is all speculation - none of us were there!) the origin of life can sort of be thought of as going from chemistry/geochemistry to biochemistry. And purely from a rate of reactions perspective, in a nice solvent like water that's likely to be more conducive to the origin of life than deep underground (in solids/highly viscous liquid at best).
Then there's also flux - do you have temporal/spatial variation in your various chemical constituents that might give rise to potential gradients (as we find in life - chemiosmosis in mitochondria for an obvious example). These are very prevalent at the sort of Lost City hydrothermal vents, where you have a very nice solvent coming into contact with a large mineral flux, with large energetic and chemical gradients. Again, less likely to be found underground.
If you're interested in this kind of thing I'd heartily recommend Nick Lane's book 'The Vital Question' or 'Transformer'. He tends to frame the issue not so much as just having the chemicals available (we find these on asteroids/meteorites!) but in having the energetic flux to get life started. Sort of akin I guess to how the components of a lightbulb don't do anything until you add an electron flux.
- If you want to learn more about possible ways for life to have started, I recommend the books by Nick Lane, especially "The Vital Question" and "Transformer."
We have several hypothesis about the origin of life, and none of them require a divine creator. It turns out non-equilibrium systems dissipating energy will create complexity, as complexity is more efficient at dissipating energy. There is a natural selection pressure for building complexity!
- If you haven't already read it, then I can highly recommend Nick Lane's 'Transformer - The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death', which goes into deep detail on this hypothesis.
He's touched on this in a couple of his earlier books, I think The Vital Question and one other, but in general all his works are relatively easy to read, and worth the effort.
