Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43769 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

The Guardian (Tim Radford)
Oxygen is the story of life on Earth.... Lane’s chapters are dispatches from the frontiers of research into Earth and life history....

Sunday Times (John Cornwell)
An extraordinary orchestration of disparate scientific disciplines, connecting the origins of life on earth with disease, age and death in human beings.

Nature (Tom Kirkwood)
an entertaining and cogent account of how oxidative stress fits in to our rapidly expanding knowledge about ageing... deserves to be widely read

Customer Reviews

In search of the elixir of life
This book gives a very broad and thoughtful perspective on the importance of oxygen in the development of life on Earth. The chain of reasoning is long and brings to contact discoveries from a series of disciplines otherwise apparently unrelated to each other. In this aspect lies one of the greatest strengths of this book, as it shows, as few have been able to shown, how important it is to have a broad perspective and an open mind to undertake a scientific research program. Besides, the author is most critic to the current trends in medical research, most of them can be traced back to such problems as over-specialisation, and lack of knowledge from nearby research fields. The huge amounts of data accumulating every day leaving no time to reduce it properly and put it coherently in a workable body of knowledge does not help either.

What does this book deal with? Oxygen is an all-important molecule, which is fundamental to life, however it is also a threatening and toxic element as well. Through this book, Nick Lane explains the importance oxygen had in the evolution of life. How it is inferred that our Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) possessed already a series of genes and proteins that lasted until our present days. How these have developed in response to oxidation stress from the environment. How the responses are similar to an organism's reaction to an infectious disease. How this is related to diseases such as Alzheimer, cancer and diabetes. How this can give clues to unravel the secrets of ageing in organisms and the search for better ways to extend a person's life span.

The book covers the early biological, atmospheric, and geological evolution of the Earth. It presents basic biochemical reaction mechanisms. It covers biology and medical research. In the whole, however, it may be considered a book on biochemistry. It also presents the author's convictions to explain a handful of biochemical processes, however controversial they may be. This is an aspect that I cannot judge for myself, as it falls completely outside of my field of expertise. This however was not an impediment for me to read and understand much of the book. But the same is not true for someone lacking some basic knowledge on biology or even biochemistry. The author misuses the terms 'metamorphosis' to refer to 'metamorphism' in rocks, and 'crystal structure' of rocks when this should refer to the minerals that constitutes rocks. However, these are minor details that do not cast any shadow in an otherwise brilliant book.

Tough Going
This book sets out the complex relationship between oxygen and life. In particular Lane discusses how organisms have adapted to using oxygen for respiration despite the inevitable production of damaging free radicals. These leads on to the role of anti-oxidants and ageing.

The concepts are introduced thick and fast. By the end you will be an expert on the differences between the Dispoable Soma and Antagonistic Pleitropy theories of ageing! However, the use of diagrams and illustrations is sparing and a general reader will find several chapters a struggle. Some sections read like a biochemistry text book and it is also unclear when he deviates from mainstream thinking into more controversial theories.

A readable account, but this belies the level of difficulty of some of the concepts and pushes it somewhat beyond the popular science genre.

Engaging and satisfying
The truly fascinating story of how oxygen shaped our world and ourselves. Without oxygen and the life it made possible, the Earth today would look like Mars; we need oxygen to survive, yet it causes our bodies to deteriorate and eventually succumb to disease. If nothing else kills you, just breathing will!

Writing objectively and entertainingly about science is a challenge that Nick Lane pulls off brilliantly in this book. Lay readers like me should be grateful that the author has resisted the temptation to over-simplify, for mass market consumption, such a richly complex subject area as this. Consequently one does need to concentrate in order to follow the plot, but Lane's way of connecting scientific ideas through their evolutionary history provides a sure thread - a thread strung with many pearls. Time after time, through painstaking research and brilliant insights, scientific notions arrive and have their day, only to be demolished by new evidence and replaced by a new paradigm. The chapters unfold like detective stories, with sub-plots, twists and turns in mankind's long struggle to understand. By the end one feels as well informed as anyone else on the planet and ready to explore the side-avenues of knowledge lying wait in the many literature sources cited.