How Life Really Works
The irony seemed a bit heavy-handed, frankly. Just as I was about to publish a book called How Life Works, my own life stopped working as it should.
Following a series of urinary tract infections, a biopsy confirmed that I have prostate cancer. Sometimes this kind of cancer just sits there and does very little, in which case regular monitoring of blood PSA levels is adequate to identify any danger. My cancer isn’t like that. It is moderately aggressive and classified as high-risk, which means that a radical intervention—in my case, surgical removal of the prostate—is needed to keep me alive.
Whether that works only time will tell, though the prognosis is hopeful. After the diagnosis but before learning from a PET scan that the cancer appears not to have spread, I was particularly mindful of life’s finiteness. Those uncertain days, lit by the golden glow of summer’s late dwindling, had a charged intensity. To my surprise, I found solace in what writing How Life Works had led me to conclude about the nature of life itself. I am now more amazed by life than ever. Like my late friend Oliver Sacks, my predominant feeling was one of gratitude. Like Oliver, I realized that “being a sentient being on this beautiful planet”—for however long that might continue—“has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
Our atoms are no different to those in rocks and air, and yet here we are.
I don’t suppose there can be many biologists who, if they delve deeply into the molecular and cell processes that sustain life, have not been astonished that life is possible at all. In , I open the black box between genes and people, navigating the byzantine details of transcription factors and gene regulation, cell communications and tissue patterning. These are places popular
