Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. 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.
Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive (Dutton, 2022) is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could craft. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to recreate life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply. Have they made life in the lab?
Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Postscript: The Supreme Court’s Decisions on Bump Stocks and Mifepristone
Paulina Rowinska, "Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers" (Pan Macmillan, 2024)
Life in a New Language, Part 2: Work
Critical Muslim Studies: Post Orientalism
Sally Stocksdale, "When Emancipation Came: The End of Enslavement on a Southern Plantation and a Russian Estate" (McFarland, 2022)
Nathaniel Gray Sutanto and Cory Brock, "T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism" (T&T Clark, 2023)
William W. Hagen, "Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Rhodri Davies, "What Is Philanthropy For?" (Bristol UP, 2023)
Jorge Almazán et al., "Emergent Tokyo:: Designing the Spontaneous City" (Oro Editions, 2024)
Conducting a Market Analysis of Your Research to Lay the Groundwork for Your Book Proposal
The Business of Publishing Children's Books: A Discussion with Elizabeth Law
Dasha Kiper, "Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain" (Random House, 2023)
Commercial Versus University Presses
Nietzsche Now! With Glenn Wallis
Jared McDonald, "Feeling Their Pain: Why Voters Want Leaders who Care" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Qian Wei, "The Governance of Philanthropic Foundations in Authoritarian China" (Routledge, 2022)
Alex V. Barnard, "Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Joanna Siekiera, "21st Century as the Pacific Century: Culture and Security of Oceania States in Great Power Competition" (Warsaw UP, 2023)
Joanna Lowell, "A Shore Thing" (Berkley Books, 2024)
Anat Kidron and Shuli Linder Yarkony, "The Jewish Community of Acre in Mandatory Palestine: The Story of a Forgotten Community" (de Gruyter, 2024)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Jim & Bill (It‘s Another Day)
HauntingLive
Dr. Paul’s Worldviews
The Ben Shapiro Show
Morning Wire