How Life Works

Starred review from October 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 ”) and his penetrating analysis underscores the stakes of outdated assumptions about DNA, as when he argues that the “blueprint” metaphor for the genome falsely suggests there’s only one “normal” developmental trajectory and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.