The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology

Professor Luisi’s book addresses the emergence of life through a systems perspective. It emphasizes the philosophical aspects of science as it examines the questions, “what is life” and “how did it begin”. He pointed out that the events that led to the origin of life did not necessarily have to happen at the exact times that they did. He also described the importance of contingencies, which can be confused with random events. Moreover, life was not part of an intelligent design in which all things are pre-destined and beyond the control of contingent events. He continued by describing the difference between self-replication and self-reproduction. He also showed that life does not necessarily depend on the presence of nucleic acids. Instead, life can be defined as an autopoietic system that has a membrane or some other boundary that separates itself from the environment. The membrane (or skin on humans) and many of the components within it are continuously being broken down and re-made. Moreover, cognition is an emergent property of life and metabolism is “the biochemical rendering of cognition at the cellular level”. Since membranes are an essential feature of life, models membranes, or vesicles are described. He then continued by describing efforts to create living organisms in a laboratory. This will help us determine just how little might be needed to create a minimal cell. This is of much more than just academic interest. Professor Luisi also described some important examples of how synthetic biology is being used for many practical applications. Cells are being designed that can produce hydrogen gas for fuel or take up and degrade the herbicide atrazine or remediate lead or cadmium contamination. There are even some potential medical applications that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other governments’ regulatory agencies may approve soon. These include a new bandage called LactoAid that will prevent infections in burn wounds without having to use antibiotics. Instead, Lactococcus lactis was genetically modified so that it could secrete three compounds that can prevent bacterial infections through several different modes simultaneously. There are also some applications using CRISPR technology, which is changing the way that many new drugs are being developed. For example, professor Luisi briefly described a project that developed a toolkit that enables the customized regulation of genes. CRISPR is being used to target specific DNA sequences that can be matched with different effector domains to either activate or repress their transcription. Another project is engineering E. coli that occurs in the gut so that it can detect a specific antigen on cancer cell membranes and to express apoptotic proteins under the control of bacterial quorum sensing. So, this is an important book that people with any different backgrounds will find useful. There is information about the philosophy of science that will help the reader understand “what is life” and “what is death”? It also provides important updates on autopoeisis and cognition that biologists will appreciate. There is chemical information about different kinds of vesicles. Then there are the examples of synthetic biology that anyone interested in new drug development and the environment will find fascinating. So, I heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in these many subjects.

Very thorough and well written summary of research on synthetic life

very good

The Emergence of Life (2016) has the most thorough discussion we have ever read on this topic. The various avenues of research get full and deep presentation, enhanced with illustrations, graphs and tables. Author Pier Luigi Luisi often includes conversations with primary research specialists when their fields are under discussion. A biochemist at the University of Rome, Luisi is a hands-on primary researcher himself, so he knows all of them.Luisi cares about the philosophy underlying the research and has much to say about topics like contingency vs. necessity, the role of religion, the definition of life, autopoiesis, synthetic biology, and minimal life. The Subject index contains about 400 entries – including a mention of panspermia!"The hardware" is the title of Chapter 2. This makes us hopeful that software will get equal treatment. Indeed, Luisi frequently mentions the difficulty of creating or finding long-enough, properly sequenced chains of amino-acids and nucleotides. But nothing more in the 11 chapters. Naturally, a biochemist will know the hardware better. And perhaps there's nothing more to say about the software anyway, we suggest.This book is a big resource: 37 pages of references, c. 300 entries in the Names index, and a 15-page Appendix of open questions – our favorite. Luisi is convinced that life originated on Earth, but every chapter mentions difficulties, unknowns and open questions. He is a thoughtful, skeptical and thorough origin-of-life scientist. We wish he would take a closer look at panspermia.