Life's Edge

The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

By: Carl Zimmer

Narrated by: Joe Ochman

“Carl Zimmer is one of the best science writers we have today.”
—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world—from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses—the harder they find it is to locate life’s edge.

Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts—whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.

Life's Edge is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could craft. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to re-create life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply. Have they made life in the lab?

Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.


Cover image Courtesy of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. © MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology/Madeline Lancaster

Fascinating and well told

I’ve listened to this book several times. It is fascinating and encompasses all aspects of the material

Darwin Dogma within.

Stopped reading when he spoke of Darwin evolution. It is time to move on from 17th century, pre-microscope science. So many scientists have.

What is Life?

This book explores the question of "What is life?" and how humanity has studied this idea and the many attempts at creating definitions for life throughout time.

I thought I knew a lot about the subjects discussed in this book, but I actually learned a lot of new history and science from listening to this work. Listening to this work changed some of my long held viewpoints and assumptions on what we know about the origins of life and how extremely difficult it is to even create a definition for life at our present level of scientific understanding.

I'd highly recommend this book to any rational, open minded person, who has ever wondered how much we actually know about the origins of life. There is a lot of very interesting history covered in this book as well, and will explain the state of humanity's understanding through time and how we arrived at the present.

Science writing for everyone, well done & fun

Great writer & great narrator. Intriguing & compelling. Most chapters are worth listening to more than once. All the stories & details are woven together nicely & realistically by the end of the book. I highly recommend it.

What is life?

This is the question you will ask yourself after reading this book. Zimmer gives us just enough information to allow us to formulate our own understanding of life. Thought-provoking!