Full name: First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began

Author: David Deamer Year: 2011 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Science Purchase/reserch links: Barns&Noble Amazon Goodreads eBooks.com LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780520274457 9780520258327 0520274458 0520258320

This pathbreaking book explores how life can begin, taking us from cosmic clouds of stardust, to volcanoes on Earth, to the modern chemistry laboratory. Seeking to understand life's connection to the stars, David Deamer introduces astrobiology, a new scientific discipline that studies the origin and evolution of life on Earth and relates it to the birth and death of stars, planet formation, interfaces between minerals, water, and atmosphere, and the physics and chemistry of carbon compounds. Deamer argues that life began as systems of molecules that assembled into membrane-bound packages. These in turn provided an essential compartment in which more complex molecules assumed new functions required for the origin of life and the beginning of evolution. Deamer takes us from the vivid and unpromising chaos of the Earth four billion years ago up to the present and his own laboratory, where he contemplates the prospects for generating synthetic life. Engaging and accessible, First Life describes the scientific story of astrobiology while presenting a fascinating hypothesis to explain the origin of life. Similar books: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard P. Feynman Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip S. Thorne Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur by Tom Lancaster Nightwatch by Terence Dickinson The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman Einstein and the Quantum by A. Douglas Stone The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil Universe by Martin Rees The Machinery of Life by David S. Goodsell The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy Theoretical Physics by Georg Joos Murmurs of Earth by Carl Sagan Understanding the Universe by Don Lincoln Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane The Ocean World by Jacques-Yves Cousteau Every Day On Earth by Steve Murrie The Tangled Web by Michal Zalewski Nature's Building Blocks by John Emsley