What Is Life?: Five Great Ideas in Biology

Written by Paul Nurse

Narrated by Paul Nurse

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist's elegant explanation of the fundamental ideas in biology and their uses today.

The renowned biologist Paul Nurse has spent his career revealing how living cells work. In What Is Life?, he takes up the challenge of describing what it means to be alive in a way that every listener can understand.

It is a shared journey of discovery; step-by-step Nurse illuminates five great ideas that underpin biology-the Cell, the Gene, Evolution by Natural Selection, Life as Chemistry, and Life as Information. He introduces the scientists who made the most important advances, and, using his personal experiences in and out of the lab, he shares with us the challenges, the lucky breaks, and the thrilling eureka moments of discovery.

Nurse writes with delight at life's richness and with a sense of the urgent role of biology in our time. To survive the challenges that face us all today-climate change, pandemic, loss of biodiversity and food security-it is vital that we all understand what life is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Mar 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781696603270

Paul Nurse

Sir Paul Nurse is a geneticist and cell biologist whose discoveries have helped to explain how the cell controls its cycle of growth and division. His contributions to cell biology and cancer research were recognised with a knighthood in 1999, and his endeavours relating to the discovery of cell cycle regulatory molecules saw him jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2001. Since 2011, he has been the director and chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute.