The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life

by Franklin M. Harold

Book Overview

What is life? Fifty years after physicist Erwin Schrodinger posed this question in his celebrated and inspiring book, the answer remains elusive. In The Way of the Cell, one of the world's most respected microbiologists draws on his wide knowledge of contemporary science to provide fresh insight into this intriguing and all-important question.
What is the relationship of living things to the inanimate realm of chemistry and physics? How do lifeless...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195163389
• ISBN13: 9780195163384
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Review by former scientist - Excellent book, very well done!

I was educated as a scientist with a focus in biochemistry. Later, I moved on to business and then psychology. I have a good background in comparative religion and philosophy as well, so this book was particularly interesting to me. The first thing that I liked was Franklin Harolds ability to explain often difficult concepts in an understandable and interesting way. This is often an obstacle to lay readers and he makes this trek as painless as possible. Without understanding some fundamental concepts of biochemisty and living systems theory, it is difficult to look deeply at the main topic which is "what is life." This book is an imaginative, but scientifically rigorous look at the nature of life. It is not, however, a simple reduction of life to physical and chemical processes. While it draws on these areas, it also invites the imagination to reach further and ponder deeper questions. Whether these will eventually be understood by science remains to be seen, but for not even at the frontiers of scientific knowledge there is much that is still a deep mystery. This book focuses heavily on the life processes of bacteria as a means of understanding life. This is a simpler system than a eukaryotic (non-bacterial cell with a true nucleus) to consider and I think this is helpful because technically a bacteria is the smallest unit of life. (Viruses are not living things, but rather supermolecular complexes.) The reader who invests the time to read this fine book will be rewarded by an expansion of his or her mind. It will ignite the imagination of even the most well-read people and yet is accessible to any intelligent laymen who has the patience to slow down and digest some of the foundational concepts. I highly recommend this book. It is extremely thought provoking.

Eloquent tribute to the mystique of Biology.

The way of the cell is the way of life, for the cell is the structural unit of all living organisms on Earth. And Franklin Harold comes close to defining life in a manner that is all-encompassing, concise, and eloquent. Any person who has taken a Biology class should not have a problem with the book, although many times the author uses terminology that does not get defined at the same time, in which case, the reader has to have a good background in Cell Biology or has to browse the glossary.Harold's eloquence is remarkable. Consider the following quotes:1. "Over time functional systems would have "crystallized" into successful configurations, and therefore become less receptive to the import of novelty..."2. "The genetic free-trade zone fragmented into protected enclaves, not abruptly but gradually on a time-scale of millions of years..."3. "...leaving a huge lacuna in any account of cell evolution, but fostering a crop of stimulating conjectures."4. "Molecular phylogenists, who draw their opinions from the bedrock of gene sequences, view the matter somewhat differently but still in a glass, darkly."5. "The better part of valor may be to sit tight and await the tide of new data, but only dullards are proof against the temptations of myth-making."6. "There is a fine air of whimsy, about those imaginative tales ...They also stop insouciantly around patches of quicksand, such as what brought about early cellular fusions that are not permitted to contemporary prokaryotes..."7. "The profusion that came after is built like a fugue upon the deep theme of eukaryotic order."8. "On the outer banks of science, one often suspects that the believer is happy while the doubter is wise; and yet, too critical a spirit is apt to overlook the genuine contribution that complexity studies have already made."9. "The rocky path from RNA replicators to DNA genes and from catalytic RNA to protein enzymes calls for stout boots and a good head for heights."This makes for engrossing reading, as the mystique of Biology can be overlooked when the text is dry and scholarly. There is delight, however, in reading Harold, similar to what the reader can get from Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Stuart Kauffman, to name a few. I can imagine Harold entertaining his audience in a seminar with his penchant for combining words elegantly.Today I was in a seminar where a famous molecular biologist (also a cancer biologist) admitted to a sabotage against the reductionist agenda as more scientists begin to realize that life processes cannot be just explained by the panoply of bioorganic molecules, proteins especially, and the genes that encode them. Harold fiercely stresses that DNA, for all the glorification that it deserves, is not all there is. New properties emerge as biological molecules find themselves in different cellular compartments and environments, at different stages in the development of the organism, and as the organisms themselves explore all possibil

Seeing the Forest And the Trees

"The typical archaeon is likely to be a lithotroph, an anaerobe, and a thermophile." (p 167)No, the author is not addicted to Latin and Greek. His writing is colloquial and accessible. It's hard to explain, but in its context that sentence above is amusing. This book is an easygoing but fairly detailed tour of cellular life. It brings us down to the level of the cell - even the bacterial cell - and then begins to investigate how things look from that perspective. From a cell's-eye view, big molecules are important parts of the landscape. Particular types of macromolecules and complexes have just a few (hundred or thousand) representatives, so each is important to the cellular economy. From here, it seems as if we can, almost, understand how a cell lives.Franklin Harold shows us, in broad strokes with descents into telling detail, what he knows, and what he (and everyone else) does not know at this point about the life of cells. This book gives us a rich picture of life at the most fundamental level, and shows us, too, the puzzles that are the subjects of current research. With his pictures of cellular action, metabolism, and growth, he is attempting to answer Shrodinger's question: what is life?We know immensely more than we used to about the details of life's machinery. But do we understand how all that intricate, mixed-up chemistry can get up and live? Harold insists that we do not, and that these questions of biochemical detail have so mesmerized us that we no longer are even asking - as if understanding emerges from a pile of facts.Franklin Harold's motivation is not lack of interest in these details (they occupied him during his years of research), nor an anti-scientific despair that says life can only be understood in some holistic and intuitive way. Rather, it is in the spirit of what is now called Complexity Theory (and used to be called General Systems Theory). Life seems to be an emergent property of the complex system we call the cell, whose many interacting parts we more or less understand if we think about them in isolation, but whose real-time interactions are too complicated and involve too much feedback to be grasped directly.He pursues this question, too, in reviewing the current state of science as it investigates the origin of life. His agnostic, but still hopeful, take on much of the rather vaporous speculation that fills in for any real results in this area rather appeals to me.This book is the best sort of popular science: it gives plenty of hard fact and cogent reasoning, but avoids the trap of exhaustive textbook detail. It is a surprisingly slow read: although the author is skilled at telling us what we need to know, he is reasoning along with us about fundamental matters that are part of the dialectic of current research. When you finish this book you will feel that you have been given a straight shot of some of the heady brew that biologists these days are imbibing.

Difficult, profound; worth the reader's best efforts

Time and again in this dense, intensely scientific exposition on cellular life, Professor Harold expresses his dissatisfaction with what he calls the "genocentric" view of life. Instead he would like to see a "focus on the cellular templet rather than the molecular gene." He believes this would represent "a significant divergence from the genocentric conception of life that now dominates the scientific literature and even more so, the popular press." (p. 100) Harold makes a strong case for his point of view; indeed, it is this book more than any other that has made me see the overriding influence the immediate molecular environment has on reproduction and growth.The genome has its "recipe," its code of instructions, but what Harold is at pains to tell us is that without the four-dimensional cellular environment in which the gene's "instructions" are carried out in a step-by-step process, there would be no growth or reproduction.What this means is that the shape and temperature, the position and abundance of the surrounding cellular elements themselves shape the genetic expression as much as or even more than the genome. All life comes from life. All cells come from cells. There is no acting out of the genetic code outside a cellular environment.And so we see Harold's frustration and that of other molecular biologists at all the hoopla that has accompanied the sequencing of the genome when it is clear that reading the code is just a very small step toward understanding how the cell reproduces itself and grows. What we need to understand is the intricate environment of the cell and how it interacts with the code leading to the epigenetic assembly of the cell and ultimately of the organism. The complications inherent in such an enterprise are truly mind-boggling in the extreme. Analysis of the four-dimensional factors would overwhelm the fastest computers in existence--all of them at the same time--if somehow we could figure out how to employ them to aid our analysis.These facts explain why scientists like Harold are insistent upon a holistic approach to biology and why they again and again warn about the limitations of a reductionist approach. Life is just too complicated to be understood by breaking it down into pieces and attempting to put it back together, or to reverse engineer it.On page 213 there is an interesting comparison of E. O. Wilson's view that there is "progress" in evolution and Stephen J. Gould's emphatic view that there is not. Harold seems to be implying that because organisms have become more complex that there is indeed at least "direction" in evolution. I would go further than this and observe that the rise of complex culture-bearing organisms like humans, who may be able to protect their home planet from a death-dealing meteor, implies if not "progress" in evolution, something equally agreeable. However, I would not say that our rise was inevitable. Indeed, along with Gould I would call it a contingency.Much of

Superb natural philosophy of life with very current science

This is an excellent book of detailed biological philosophy that is often a sheer delight to read. I guess the best comparison I can think of off the top of my head is to Lewis Thomas' thought provoking "Lives of a Cell," but with extremely current science. This is particularly welcome in these days when we are being inundated with the pros and cons of genetics, the emphasis here is off of the genome itself and onto its role in constructing the cell and bringing life into being. The cell is, to put it simply, the basic unit of life. This beautifully written book investigates the principles of what science knows about the cell, and also their limits. In so doing, it also investigates much of what we know about life. While it gets very detailed at times, it is still quite readable by educated non-specialists. "Way of the Cell" makes judicious and consistent use of current state of the art principles such as self-organization, self-assembly, and the dynamics of far from equillibrium reactions, yet it doesn't get carried away with them. This book remains solidly rooted to science throughout, even when it probes the boundaries of what we know of the complex processes in living cells. We are treated to several very interesting, measured, and contemporary accounts of the relationship of form and function, and how cells construct themselves. The author is very much a lyrical poet of nature philosophy as well as a serious biochemist. There are also a number of insights into the history and critical observations of biological science, but the book never becomes history-heavy. It is always foremost a book of wonderment at what science tells us about life.There is a unique discussion of the origins of life, concluding that the answer lies in the utterly remote past, but with remarkable candor admitting that without novel and powerful methods of historical inquiry, we soon reach a limit to what we can discover about it with much certainty. This is followed by an epilogue about the meaning of life, and the author's personal view that science must remain silent on matters of morality.This is a book that brings evolution, thermodynamics, information theory, developmental biology, cell biology, and genetics into close and comfortable conjunction, and even a fair degree of synthesis in spots. There are many profound insights here to be gleaned, and even more distinctive new perspectives on old ideas. There is an awful lot of "new wine in old bottles" here in the way the authors approach each topic. There are very few extremes or excessive claims here to criticize, it just all fits together wonderfully. This is a book that will be particularly appreciated by those who enjoy Lynn Margulis' "system" perspective on organisms, but I think it should be read by anyone interested in deep questions of the nature of life from the perspective of science.Contents:Schrodinger's RiddleThe Quality of LifeCells in Nature and TheoryMolecular LogicA (almost) Compre