Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

by Nick Lane

Isaac Asimov (a biochemist, by the way) once said that new discoveries are not accompanied by ‘Eureka!’, but ‘That’s funny …’.

Shrink yourself down to the size of a molecule in the Krebs cycle. Succinate. The cell you’re part of is the size of a city, a metropolis on the scale of London, Tokyo or New York. What connects you with another molecule of succinate across the city, twenty miles away? In what sense are you part of the same entity, the same self? You won’t even be succinate for long. In a tiny fraction of a second, you will transform into malate, then oxaloacetate, or perhaps an amino acid or sugar. You are a fleeting moment in the kaleidoscope of metabolism, shape-changing a billion times a second. There’s no sense in which information binds you. Yet you are still part of an entity, a self. Your flux through the Krebs cycle is linked, moment by moment, with the balance of metabolism, with how much there is of you compared with the next molecule. You are bound to the flow of electrons, to the pumping of protons, to the electrical charge on the membrane, to the genes switched on and off.