Where do we search for the fundamental stuff of life?
While Gregor Mendel’s of genetic inheritance remain a staple of life sciences education in the United States, the 2024 store shelves are now lined with popular science books that tell us that our old pictures of the biological world ain’t what they used to be. Modern biology has threatened to turn much of what we’ve learned about biology on its head. All of a sudden, we are losing faith that the gene is the sole dictator of traits and fates. We learn in parallel that the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens isn’t what we thought a decade ago, all while (where molecular biology is used to build and design molecules and organisms) continues to explore the boundaries of living and nonliving. New discoveries complicate simple narratives for how it all works.
In the face of this, two new books — Sara Imari Walker’s “: The Physics of Life’s Emergence” and Thomas Cech’s “: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets” — offer original and much different (even if not conflicting) perspectives on how to construct a new picture of life. In Walker’s world, life has unique features that require brand new theoretical tools for us to properly comprehend. Cech offers that biology’s defining engine is not new at all but has been sitting under our noses (and inside our cells) all along. In sum, they capture the exuberance that lives in the various questions on the origins of life and what we can learn from exploring it. The study of the beginnings of life on Earth has now emerged, in my view, from a field dominated by speculative theories to one populated by large data sets, new technologies, and sophisticated theories. Indeed, Walker’s and Cech’s books are a sign that the quasi-race to understand what makes life work might be a fertile expanse for scientific theory and empirical discovery.
Walker is a theoretical physicist who has built an international reputation for her work in astrobiology and questions related to the origins of life. In her book, she lays out a provocative argument that the standard set of theories that we use to describe matter and forces are insufficient for understanding what, and why, life is. As chemist Lee Cronin has pointed out, the study of the origins of life doesn’t fit into current paradigms, but it is on the precipice of radical change, one that will doubtlessly be fomented by brand new theories.
Walker explains why asking how life on Earth began is such an important question: “Solving it will open new ways of thinking that start to unlock the other (perhaps harder) hard problems.”
In “Life as No One Knows It,” Walker questions our reliance on the notion that life is just another manifestation of the same-old biology, chemistry, and physics theories and methods. She spends significant time on an idea that she helped to pioneer called . It proposes that living matter has an organizational structure that can be computed from its parts. That is, if we identify an object, we have a means through which we can measure whether that object is part of, or the product of, a biological process. The theory applies modern physics to understanding what life might look like: It is quantitative and agnostic to our earthly (and biased) definitions of biology.
Cech’s “The Catalyst” fits a mold of the grand science book of yesteryear: A highly successful and established scientist (in this case, one who shared the 1989 in Chemistry) writes a grand book related to the ideas on which they built their reputation, adding some bolder claims. At best, these books can take us inside the mind and experiences of the people who changed our picture of nature. At worst, this style of book can suffer from an author unaware of their limitations (a form of the ) or an editor too afraid to tell them. Thankfully, “The Catalyst” is closer to the former: a measured treatise on the centrality of RNA in the living world. This includes a detailed history of our modern understanding of RNA — not written by a historian, but by one of RNA’s most respected advocates.
The messages of the books are so different that we need not contrive a conflict: Walker is a physicist talking about fundamental theories on what a living thing is; Cech is highlighting the history and importance of one of molecular biology’s uncredited main characters. However, the projects are useful to describe in tandem because they are a sign of the times: We have entered an era in which we are beginning to recognize that enormous data collection efforts alone will not solve fundamental questions about life. Proper answers will require some abstract theorizing and old-fashioned peering inside of cells.
Cech’s book highlights the many triumphs that have come from investigation into how RNA works. Unsurprisingly (and thankfully) Cech highlights the discovery of the that powered the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, one of the most impressive scientific exercises in recent memory. And it was the work of Katalin Karik贸 and Drew Weissman that helped spawn this movement by unlocking the potential of mRNA to serve as the basis for a new generation of vaccines. The pair was eventually awarded the in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.
Similarly, Cech highlights how drugs that target RNA within cells are already generating promising directions for disease