Biological Sciences: Biology and Microbiology

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 reader 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.

Molecular biology is the story of the molecules of life, their relationships, and how these interactions are controlled. In this Very Short Introduction, Aysha Divan and Janice Royds examine the history, present, and future of molecular biology, starting with the building blocks established by Darwin, Wallace and Mendel, and the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. They also consider the wide range of applications for molecular biology today, including the development of new drugs, and forensic science and look forward to two key areas of evolving research, such as personalized medicine and synthetic biology.

Epigenetics upends natural selection and genetic mutation as the sole engines of evolution, and offers startling insights into our future heritable traits. In the 1700s, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck first described epigenetics to explain the inheritance of acquired characteristics; however, his theory was supplanted in the 1800s by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection through heritable genetic mutations. But natural selection could not adequately explain how rapidly species re-diversified and repopulated after mass extinctions. Now advances in the study of DNA and RNA have resurrected epigenetics, which can create radical physical and physiological changes in subsequent generations by the simple addition of a single small molecule, thus passing along apropensity for molecules to attach in the same places in the next generation. Epigenetics is a complex process, but paleontologist and astrobiologist Peter Ward breaks it down for general readers, using the epigenetic paradigm to reexamine how the history of our species--from deep time to the outbreak of the Black Plague and into the present--has left its mark on our physiology, behavior, and intelligence. Most alarming are chapters about epigenetic changes we are undergoing now triggered by toxins, environmental pollutants, famine, poor nutrition, and overexposureto violence. Lamarck's Revenge is an eye-opening and provocative exploration of how traits are inherited, and how outside influences drive what we pass along to our progeny.