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Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

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Cancer cells need NADPH for biosynthesis and growth, and it is as important to them as ATP. Cells must wire their metabolism to get the balance between ATP, NADPH and carbon skeletons right. Aerobic respiration produces too much ATP, which actually switches off the glycolytic breakdown of glucose. Cancer cells must not make too much ATP, as it slows down their growth. Cancer cells switch over to aerobic glycolysis precisely because it makes less ATP, favoring faster growth.

To grasp the Krebs cycle is to fathom the deep coherence of biology. It connects the first photosynthetic bacteria with our peculiar cells. It links the emergence of consciousness with the inevitability of death. And it puts the subtle differences between individuals in the same grand story as the rise of the living world itself. An exhilarating account of the biophysics of life, stretching from the first stirrings of living matter to the psychology of consciousness. I felt as if I was there, every step of the way’

About the book

A lot of this remains speculative, but the answer seems to be that you need genes to be independent. And so this is a fundamental question: Where and when are the genes coming in?

Life started out using the Krebs cycle to convert gases into living cells—the engine of biosynthesis. But modern animals use it for biosynthesis and to generate energy. They can’t spin the cycle in both directions at the same time, so how did they manage?Lane is British and makes no concessions to American English. Experiments work “first go,” not first try. We fly in aeroplanes and put on jumpers instead of sweaters. And in the fall, perhaps we engage in a programme of maths or simply enjoy the tonne of colours in the trees. What is a feeling—love or hunger or pain—in physical terms? There is no obvious reason why the release of neurotransmitters or the depolarization of neurons should feel like anything at all. This touches on some elemental concepts, and Lane is fine with that. He’s devoted this entire book to explaining an incredibly complex chemical cycle to a general reading public that’s more scientifically illiterate than any in over a century (in 2022, roughly 83 million Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth); if he doesn’t want the whole of Transformer to read like this: “The enzyme that catalyses the interconversion of isocitrate into a-ketoglutarate is known as isocitrate dehydrogenase,” he’s going to have to do plenty of this kind of elemental generalizing: “To understand this cycle of energy and matter is to resolve the deep chemical coherence of the living world, connecting the origin of life with the devastation of cancer, the first photosynthetic bacteria with our own mitochondria, the abrupt evolutionary leap to animals with sulfurous sludge, the big history of our planet with the trivial differences between ourselves, perhaps even the stream of consciousness.” Every life sciences major remembers learning about the Krebs cycle in college; if your undergraduate experience was anything like mine, then you also remember forgetting it immediately. When we learn about this cycle at the heart of metabolism, it’s presented almost exclusively in the context of energy production. Producing ATP is important, but so is generating the macromolecules that come to constitute tissues and organs. Metabolism does both, utilizing the Krebs cycle as a sort of roundabout to accomplish the needs of the cell. Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0192804815.

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