Transformer Quotes

“Life is the interplay between structure and energy.”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

“The dream of every cell is to become two cells’ said François Jacob, the most lyrical revolutionary of molecular biology. No cell lives the dream so wholly or so senselessly as a cancer cell, turning dream to nightmare. Nothing else captures the myopic immediacy of natural selection so starkly. The moment is all that matters for selection: there is no foresight, no balance, no slowing at the prospect of doom. Just the best ploy for the moment, for me, right now, not for the many, and often mistaken. Cancer cells die in piles, necrotic flesh worse than the trenches. The decimated survivors mutate, evolve, adapt, exploit their shifting environment, selfish to the bitter end. Their horror is that they know no bounds. They will eat away at our flesh to fuel their pointless lives and deaths, until, if we are unlucky, they take us too. I am writing about cancer, but must confess that I have the pointless greed and destruction of humanity at the back of my mind. May we find it within ourselves to be better than cancer cells.”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

“The need to prevent ferredoxin reacting with oxygen might also explain the propensity of rubisco to fix O2 through the apparently futile process of photorespiration. Very little in evolution is genuinely futile; if it survives natural selection there is usually a reason. In the case of rubisco, think what happens if CO2 levels fall while O2 levels rise inside a leaf (when the stomatal pores are closed). Now rubisco is obliged to slow down because its substrate, CO2, is in short supply. This means that NADPH cannot pass on its electrons to regenerate NADP+. As a result, ferredoxin in turn is unable to pass on its electrons, and so it becomes reactive with oxygen, just when oxygen levels are rising. To stave off catastrophe, rubisco consumes oxygen instead. Photorespiration converts NADPH back to NADP+, allowing ferredoxin to offload its electrons again. So it could be that photorespiration acts as a safety valve, lowering the levels of reactive ferredoxin and oxygen simultaneously, staving off an impending catastrophe.”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

“Keen to progress the work on photosynthesis, Lawrence hired Melvin Calvin, a colleague from the Manhattan Project, immediately after the war. The story has it that on the day of the Japanese surrender Lawrence told Calvin that ‘Now is the time to do something useful with radioactive carbon.”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

“Putting terms aside, we’ll see that the ancient biosynthetic Krebs cycle was fixing CO2 a billion years before rubisco and the evolution of photosynthesis in the cyanobacterial ancestors of plant chloroplasts. When it first emerged, the reverse Krebs cycle had little to do with energy generation, instead providing the carbon skeletons needed for biosynthesis. This perspective elucidates the deep metabolism of cells, yet it is still largely missing from the more medically oriented textbooks. It’s a serious omission.”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

“Hopkins’s real mission was the development of biochemistry as an experimental discipline, with its own methodology and way of seeing the world. It was vibrant and fun. The lab’s journal, Brighter Biochemistry, included compilations of verse (Haldane wrote an annual report in rhyming couplets), exam questions from the future, cartoons and cautionary tales, such as laments for ‘Jane who had no bacteriological technique and so perished miserably’ and ‘Belinda who broke everything and left the laboratory under lamentable circumstances.’ Don’t be fooled by their irreverence. These were serious minds at play, and Hoppy’s laboratory nurtured some of the most imaginative and original scientists of their generation, including a number who went on to win Nobel prizes.”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

“Almost the only thing we know for sure about consciousness is that it is, so to speak, soluble in ether, chloroform and a variety of other solvents ...”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

“Mitochondria convert flux through the Krebs cycle into electrical membrane potential. The membrane is a capacitor: a thin insulating layer that separates two electrically charged aqueous phases, generating powerful electrical fields across the membrane. Changes”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

“Core metabolism has changed little in part because it was never powered down in its four-billion-year history. The genes are custodians of this flame, but without the flame life is – dead.”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

“A cell can also look static under a microscope, yet its state is the product of more than a billion metabolic reactions every second.11 You are composed of at least thirty trillion cells, so in the last second your tranquil demeanour was sustained by an incomprehensible one hundred billion trillion reactions (1023, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). I’m now in my mid-fifties, so my wrinkles and aches and pains are the product of about 1032 reactions to date, roughly a billion times”
― Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death