posted on 07 Sep 2020

What is Life: understand biology in five steps by Paul Nurse

Back in the dim and distant past biology was one of my favourite subjects at school and I did pretty well in the ‘O’ level exam at the end of my time there. The text book we used – whose name I’ve forgotten – was a large format hardback that focussed on biology as if it was a technical manual. Flora, fauna and the natural environment were examined as if everything was a specimen to be dissected, probed or prodded to uncover how it all works. It treated the natural world and life itself in way that suggested it was nothing more than a sophisticated machine. Despite that, I especially liked drawing cross-sections of just about everything from a bull’s eye to the human reproductive organs or, by contrast, a section through a soil sample. These drawings, all neatly labelled, were probably the most convincing art I have ever managed to put down on paper.

We were encouraged to see life in the way a mechanic views a car but we were never invited to ask what this thing called life was actually all about. The notion that we might engage with ideas of how a practical understanding of biology meshed with philosophical ideas about how to interpret this evidence was just never on the agenda. It’s something I now bitterly regret and although I could probably still have a crack at drawing and labelling a cross section of the ear, I would have loved to go beyond that and think about ideas of evolution, the implications of the discovery of DNA and even what the interface between biology and public health means. In truth, education in a late 1960s technical school didn’t encourage the indiscriminate use of thinking.

Paul Nurse’s book, What Is Life is precisely the kind of book that I needed back then because it’s about as far from a biological manual as its possible to get. Nurse is, of course, perfectly placed to write a book that takes us effortlessly into the philosophical hinterland of biology. He has a string of extraordinary achievements behind him – Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK, President of Rockefeller University, President of the Royal Society, Director of the Francis Crick Institute. Oh, and I almost forgot, a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Phew.

What is perhaps more startling when you read his brief profile at the end of this publication is that this is his first book. How did that happen? It’s odd because this is such a consummate and readable introduction to what could be an off-puttingly complex subject. It is, in my experience, the most simple questions that are the most difficult to answer and is there a more simple (or more important) question than ‘what is life?’.

What Nurse has done here is to split the argument into five sections: The Cell, The Gene, Evolution and Natural Selection, Life as Chemistry and Life as Information. Each one of these sections can be read as stand-alone chapters and when they link together they constitute a landscape of thinking about what life is, what ‘biology’ means. He tries to answer this question  through the application of a series of ‘principles’ or characteristics: the ability to evolve, the relationship an organism has to its environment and that ‘living entities are chemical, physical and informational machines’.

Ultimately, the key message Paul Nurse has to deliver is the inter-connectedness of all life:

“We are bound by a deep connectedness to all other life: to the crawling beetles, infecting bacteria, fermenting yeast, inquisitive mountain gorillas ….as well as to every other member of the biosphere….As far as we know, we humans are the only life forms who can see this deep connectivity and reflect on what it all might mean.”

If, in these post-Covid times, you have been moved to think about all these issues in relation to yourself, other people and the role of the invisible virus, this is the book that will help you get your head around these issues.

Highly recommended.

 

Terry Potter

September 2020