Transformer

I shouldn't admit this, but I've never found biochemistry at all interesting. I'm a biophysicist and routinely amazed by the versatility of physics and enchanted by the variety of biology. Lists of amino acids or the chemical reactions of the various types of sugars bore me to tears, though; I appreciate their importance, but I couldn't imagine studying them.

Therefore, reading this book was a revelation: Lane makes biochemistry seem sensible, deep, and fundamental, with rules and consequences central to life's origin. As an added bonus, Lane connects all this to vexing current problems, like the nature of cancer.

Study of the Warburg effect has stimulated broader interest in how metabolism might regulate cellular and organismal biology. 

This volume gives voice to this nascent field. The Krebs or tricarboxylic acid cycle—the “one ring to rule them all”—produces reduced co-enzymes that are then oxidized by the electron transport chain to produce the trans-membrane proton gradient. The Krebs cycle also produces numerous precursors for biosynthesis. It can thus signal the metabolic state of the cell, switching numerous genes on or off. 

Intermediary metabolism, long ignored by many biologists, may thus be the key to much of what cells and organisms are… show more.