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Over the past two decades or so, biology has undergone a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works - the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more - have been exposed as incomplete, misleading or wrong. The popular narratives of biology have not kept pace with these changes; instead we have been encouraged to view the processes of life as a black box within which the details are too dizzyingly complicated to contemplate. How Life Works opens up that black box and shows life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. It explains that there is no unique place to look for the answer to how life works: it is a hierarchical system of many levels, each with its own rules and principles: genes, proteins, cells, tissues and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system. How Life Works explains how each level operates and how they interface and work together (most of the time). With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living entities, tissues and organisms. We can reprogram cells to carry out new tasks and grown into structures not seen in the natural world. As we continue to discover the rules that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more profound. Some researchers believe that ultimately this will enable us to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even to create new life forms that evolution has never imagined. How Life Works will offer nothing less than a new view of the life sciences. Informed by cuttingedge research and drawing on ideas that are only now just beginning to reach the scientific literature, it will ultimately revise our concept of what life itself is, how to fix it, and what unforeseen possibilities it offers. ...
