Review: The Vital Question

Can a book be both dry and riveting? Yes, it can. Although Nick Lane does not always succeed in his ambition to do better than textbook style writing, this challenging and exhausting book rewards the reader with an up-to-date understanding of the evolved nanotechnology we call “life”.

This isn’t a book about cool animals, or about evolution as a whole. Lane focuses very much on life at the very small scale, such as the inner workings of mitochondria, the power houses of the cell. It’s an understanding of this inner cell machinery – which exploits effects even at the level of quantum tunneling – that hold great promises for humanity: curing cancer, manufacturing life-saving drugs cheaply, even solving the world’s energy crisis.

Therein also lies the difficulty in writing a book like this: you can’t do it without going into wickedly complex biochemistry and physics, or without encountering biology’s hefty jargon. Lane does his best with illustrations and a glossary, but this book would still have benefited from more attention to its complex sections, and less repetition of its core theses.

That said, the central case for the “energy bottleneck” that led to the development of complex cells is well made, and has potentially profound and far-reaching implications for astrobiology.

I’m giving this book 4.5 stars, but rounding up because Lane’s work is a breath of fresh air in a world with mountains of pop-sci books that pretend-explain things by throwing endless unconnected anecdotes at the reader. In contrast, you may want to come back to this book repeatedly to understand some of its nuance better, if you don’t find yourself too frustrated by its most challenging parts.