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The I Index

Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

Next in the queue

64

/100

I Index Overall Rating

Readers

40/100

Critics

87/100

Scholars

N/A

Author:

Carl Zimmer

Publisher:

Dutton

Date:

March 9, 2021

Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Popular science writer Carl Zimmer leads readers all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up, asking: What does it mean to live?

What The Reviewers Say

Siddhartha Mukherjee,
The New York Times Book Review
... elegant, deeply researched.
Rob Dunn,
Science
One has the feeling, while reading this book, of fumbling through the unknown.
Jacob Brogan,
The Washington Post
No mere catalogue of errors, Life’s Edge guides us from an abandoned mine in the Adirondacks where bats hang in homeostatic slumber to a California start-up attempting to synthesize RNA-based medications. With these and other examples, Zimmer illustrates why it is so difficult to arrive at a common understanding of where life stops and starts—and how we might one day reach it.
Tony Miksanek,
Booklist
Zimmer diligently tackles the true definition of life.