How Life Works

Ball is a terrific writer … An essential primer in our never-ending quest to understand life – Adam Rutherford, The GuardianBall is a ferociously gifted science writer … There is so much [here] that is amazing … urgent … astonishing * The Sunday Times *Ambitious and eye-opening * Financial Times *The best biology book I’ve ever read – Brian Clegg, Popular ScienceA mind-stretching book … Ball is a clarifier supreme. It is hard to imagine a more concise, coherent, if also challenging, single volume written on the discoveries made in the life sciences over the past 70 years * The Spectator *Full of fascinating information … The dedicated reader will come away with many novel insights and a new perspective on what makes life special * The Times Literary Supplement *Lucid … suggests that before they can understand what really comprises life, biologists have first to unlearn a great deal of what they think they know * New Statesman *Well researched, interesting, and stimulating * Science *Ball deftly explains how it’s possible to follow, in exquisite detail, how cells develop and specialise to form an organism. We are revising life constantly, and Ball’s account of synthetic biology takes us to this exciting frontier * Prospect *A must-read user’s guide for biologists and non-biologists alike … It’s time to stop pretending that, give or take a few bits and pieces, we know how life works. Instead, we must let our ideas evolve as more discoveries are made in the coming decades – Denis Noble, NatureBall’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep … How Life Works has exciting implications for the future of the science of biology itself. I could not put it down – Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-FictionBall has the rare ability to explain scientific concepts across very diverse disciplines… . He explains the turn away from a purely mechanical view of life to one that embraces the inherently dynamic, complex, multilayered, interactive, and cognitive nature of the processes by which life sustains and regenerates itself – James Shapiro, author of EvolutionOffers a much-needed examination of exciting, cutting-edge findings in contemporary biology that is likely to dramatically transform our understanding of living systems – Daniel J. Nicholson, coeditor of Everything FlowsBall takes glee in tearing down scientific shibboleths … and his penetrating analysis underscores the stakes of outdated assumptions… . Provocative and profound, this has the power to change how readers understand life’s most basic mechanisms * Publishers Weekly *In showing that complex life is more ‘emergent’ than ‘programmed,’ Ball takes on many conventional notions about biology … Offers plenty of food for thought for scientists in disciplines from medicine to engineering – Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Modern Myths, The Book of Minds, and How Life Works. He lives in London.