How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology

by Philip Ball

Overview

“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies

A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.
 
Biology is undergoing 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.
 
In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).
 
With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.
 
Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226840062
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/05/2025
Edition description:	First Edition
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water and The Music Instinct. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also the 2022 recipient of the Royal Society’s Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal for contributions to the history, philosophy, or social roles of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol, and he was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

All the same, I believe we can do better. I will show how research in molecular and cell biology over the past several years has painted a richer and much more astonishing picture than that bleak and obsolete mechanical metaphor. The picture does at times appear fantastically baroque and perplexing, but in the end it takes the burden of control off the shoulders of the genome, relying instead on principles and processes of self-organization that, precisely because they have no need of tight genetic guidance, avoid the fragility that would engender. I must stress that there is nothing in this new view that conflicts with the neo-Darwinian idea that evolution shapes us and all other organisms and that it depends on the genetic transmission of information between parent and offspring. However, in this new view genes are not selfish and authoritarian dictators. They don’t possess any real agency at all, for they can accomplish nothing alone and lack a capacity for making decisions. They are servants, not masters.
Fundamentally, this new view of biology—which is by no means complete, and indeed is still only nascent—depends on a kind of trust. You could say that genes are able to trust that there are processes beyond their capacity to directly control that will nonetheless allow organisms to grow and thrive and evolve. (Biologists need to develop that trust too.) This way of working appears repeatedly in biology when things get complicated and tasks get hard. When organisms first became multicellular, when they became able to adjust to and exploit the full richness of their surroundings through sensory modalities like vision and smell, when their sensitivity and receptivity to the environment became genuine cognition, it seems that life increasingly relinquished a strategy of prescribing the response of the organism to every stimulus, and instead supplied the basic ingredients for systems that could devise and improvise solutions to living that are emergent, versatile, adaptive, and robust.
The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines. There never has been a machine made by humankind that works as cells do. This is not to deny that living things are ultimately made of insensate and indeed inanimate molecules: we need no recourse to the old idea of vitalism, which posited that some fundamental and mysterious force made the difference between living and inert matter. Yet dispensing with the machine view of life allows us to see what it really is that distinguishes it from the inanimate world. The distinction is as fundamental and wondrous as the formation of the universe itself—but more amenable to scientific study, and for that reason probably more tractable.
In particular, life is not to be equated with that special kind of machine, the computer. It is certainly true that life performs kinds of computation, and indeed there are key features of biology that can be fairly well understood using the theory of information developed to describe modern information technologies. What is more, a comparison with machines can sometimes be a useful way of thinking about how parts of the process that is life operates. I will occasionally make such parallels. It is meaningful to say that our cells possess pumps, motors, sensors, storage, and readout devices. That, however, is very different from the modern trend of discussing the fundamental features of living organisms by comparing them to electrical circuits, computers, or factories. No computer today works as cells do, and it is far from clear that they ever will (or that this would be a good way to make a computer anyway). There is so far no technological artifact that provides a good analogy for living systems. These are a different kind of entity, with their own logic, and they have to be their own metaphor.
 

Table of Contents

Prologue
Chapter 1. The End of the Machine: A New View of Life
Chapter 2. Genes: What DNA Really Does
Chapter 3. RNA and Transcription: Reading the Message
Chapter 4. Proteins: Structure and Unstructure
Chapter 5. Networks: The Webs That Make Us
Chapter 6. Cells: Decisions, Decisions
Chapter 7. Tissues: How to Build, When to Stop
Chapter 8. Bodies: Uncovering the Pattern
Chapter 9. Agency: How Life Gets Goals and Purposes
Chapter 10. Troubleshooting: Rethinking Medicine
Chapter 11. Making and Hacking: Redesigning Life
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Source Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The book really does deliver on its subtitle 'A user’s guide to the new biology.' . . .  You will be richly rewarded with a far more accurate picture of biology and medicine than so many books that came before."

Evolution 2.0

"A robust and sustained takedown of the 'simplistic', 'distorted', 'barren' and 'intellectually thin' notion that biology is all about the gene. There is very much more to life than that, according to Ball. It might even have some meaning. . . . Ball is a ferociously gifted science writer. . . . There is so much [in How Life Works] that is amazing. . . . Urgent. . . . Astonishing."

Sunday Times - James McConnachie

"Ball is a clarifier supreme. It is hard to imagine a more concise, coherent, if also challenging, single volume written on the discoveries made in the life sciences over the past seventy years. . . . How Life Works has a sense of up-to-the-minute authority. Yet Ball is also deeply alive to the human story within his project, leavening technical matters with wit and humour. He opens with a synoptic history of the way thinkers from Aristotle onwards have characterised life’s operation. He digresses to incorporate many knotted cultural subplots which are embedded in the seemingly sterilised surfaces of the laboratory."

The Spectator - Mark Cocker

"In his 2023 book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology, science writer Ball says genes are not the blueprint for life—that living systems are not operating simply like machines, and how genes operate depends on external factors such as diet and environment."

"Mr. Smarty Pants Knows" Austin Chronicle

"We are rewarded with some astonishing revelations. For example, it is possible to rearrange the face of a tadpole, so that the eyes are where the ears should be and the nose is where the mouth goes, but when that tadpole transforms into a frog, its face is as it should be, a beautiful frog you might want to kiss. This reconfiguration does not occur through genetics. . . . We are our genes is only partly true, and we don’t yet have the complete picture. This book goes pretty deep into biology, but it provides an excellent overview of our current understanding of how life works."

Fireside Reading

"I thought this book was wonderful, one of the best popular science books I’ve read in a long time. . . . It was a very good introduction to debunking Richard Dawkins-like 'primacy of the gene' stories, rather seeing genes as part of a broader, fairly flexible biological ecosystem. . . . Definitely recommended."

Marginal Revolution - Tyler Cowen

★ 10/23/2023

Nearly all “the neat stories that researchers routinely tell about how living cells work are incomplete, flawed, or just totally mistaken,” according to this bold report. Science writer Ball (Beautiful Experiments) explains how advances in biology have upended traditional understandings of how organisms develop and reproduce. The most revelatory material pushes back against the notion that DNA constitutes the “blueprint” for life. For instance, Ball notes that mutations in the Wnt1 gene, which appears in many animal species, were found to hinder wing growth in flies yet cause cancer in mice, suggesting that genes don’t have a one-to-one effect on physical attributes. Instead, Ball explains, genes merely “impart capabilities” as cells develop into organisms by responding to chemical signals from their environment and neighboring cells. The author takes glee in tearing down scientific shibboleths (“ ‘Our fate,’ James Watson has said, ‘is in our genes.’ ”) and his penetrating analysis underscores the stakes of outdated assumptions about DNA, as when he argues that the “blueprint” metaphor for the genome falsely suggests there’s only one “normal” developmental trajectory and casts as “aberrations” such conditions as autism, which he contends is just one of the human genome’s myriad possible biological outcomes. Provocative and profound, this has the power to change how readers understand life’s most basic mechanisms. Photos. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Ball demotes the role of the double helix molecule, arguing that biology is far messier and marvellous than many scientists suspected. . . . Ambitious and eye-opening."

Financial Times - Debora Mackenzie

"Readers of this book will enjoy a veritable tour de force of first-class biological science writing and a truly wonderful introduction to much that is new in the understanding of how life works."

South African Journal of Science

“In his bold and intriguing How Life Works, the journalist and author Philip Ball tackles the thorny issue of causality in biological systems. While acknowledging formidable advances in our understanding, Ball argues that the structural triumphs of molecular biology and the pervasive language of genes have obscured life’s true nature. . . . Life, he says, ‘will not be found in the genome’; it ‘does not resemble any instruction booklet ever made by humans.’ Living things cannot be reduced to a parts list.

Wall Street Journal - Adrian Woolfson

 "Well researched, interesting, and stimulating. Ball’s very eloquent presentation . . . is a useful reminder to continue to interpret genetics and genomics with care."

Science

"Ball is a terrific writer, pumping out books on incredibly diverse subjects at a rate that makes me feel jealous and inadequate. There’s a wealth of well-researched information in here. . . . The book serves as an essential primer on our never-ending quest to understand life. Ultimately, 'what is life?' is a question without a useful answer. 'How does life work?' is the question that should drive the next wave of aspiring biologists from the cradle to the grave."

Guardian (Book of the Day) - Adam Rutherford

"Why did the genome fail to deliver? The answer is that life turned out to be more complicated than the sequencing pioneers imagined. A conceptual earthquake has radically shifted the gene paradigm underpinning biology since the early twentieth century. . . . Ball aims to address these shortcomings with a new vision of biology."

Times Literary Supplement - Johnjoe McFadden

“Ball has the rare ability to explain scientific concepts across very diverse disciplines. In his book How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology he employs that understanding to introduce the reader to the profound changes taking place in the life sciences. As researchers understand in ever-greater detail how sensitive, sophisticated, and purposeful different living organisms can be, Ball explains the turn away from a purely mechanical view of life to one that embraces the inherently dynamic, complex, multilayered, interactive, and cognitive nature of the processes by which life sustains and regenerates itself.

James A. Shapiro

“Ball’s new book offers a much-needed examination of exciting, cutting-edge findings in contemporary biology that is likely to dramatically transform our understanding of living systems—what they are (and, even more importantly, what they are not!), how they are organized at different levels, and the way they develop over time. It will be of interest not just to professional biologists and students of biology, but also to historians and philosophers of science, as well as to anyone curious to learn about the current state-of-play in twenty-first century life science.

Daniel J. Nicholson

“Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. It explores the fundamental mechanics of biology and leaves the reader full of awe and wonder. More than this, by reframing how we talk about the latest scientific discoveries, How Life Works has exciting implications for the future of the science of biology itself. I could not put it down.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

"For too long, scientists have been content in espousing the lazy metaphor of living systems operating simply like machines, says science writer Ball in How Life Works. Yet, it’s important to be open about the complexity of biology—including what we don’t know—because public understanding affects policy, health care and trust in science. . . . Ultimately, Ball concludes that 'we are at the beginning of a profound rethinking of how life works.' In my view, beginning is the key word here. Scientists must take care not to substitute an old set of dogmas with a new one. It’s time to stop pretending that, give or take a few bits and pieces, we know how life works. Instead, we must let our ideas evolve as more discoveries are made in the coming decades. Sitting in uncertainty, while working to make those discoveries, will be biology’s great task for the twenty-first century."

Nature - Denis Noble

★ 2023-08-24
Generating a new language for the book of life.

Life is not all about tidy genetic blueprints; it is influenced by "messy and capricious" elements so many levels that genes are “just ingredients for creating a palette of...possibilities,” writes Ball, a former longtime editor at Nature and author of many books about science and nature. He first examines old biological tenets gone wrong, such as the notion that one gene is equal to one protein, or that correcting single gene mutations can “cure” most diseases. Language, writes the author, is the only “human technology” that bears any resemblance to the “mechanism of life...undoubtedly because it is a kind of ‘organic technology’ as much a part of our biological nature as is our flesh and blood, our minds, our cultures." Like life, when “you reduce it to its component parts, you lose its meaning.” Later, the author continues, “meaning carries a lot of baggage in biology, and you’ll rarely see it used in an academic text on the topic. But it’s a crucial concept, because it conveys a large part of what distinguishes life from other states of matter.” Many DNA sequences linked to complex traits and diseases are outside the “coding” genome,” and genes that generate fins can be “readily redirected to make an arm…Rapid phenotypic change is possible precisely because so little is demanded of the genes themselves.” In showing that complex life is more “emergent” than “programmed,” Ball takes on many conventional notions about biology. “We are at the beginning of a profound rethinking of how life works,” he writes. Evolution has consistently invented new ways of creating living beings, and it will continue to do so. “The challenge,” writes the author, “is to find a good way of talking about these vital stratagems,” and his latest book offers plenty of food for thought for scientists in disciplines from medicine to engineering.

A bold effort to create a new language that forces a “rethinking” of “thinking itself.

Kirkus Reviews