The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology [ハードカバー]

The Emergence of Life by Pier Luigi Luisi is a thoughtful book. It is not a book where to find easy answers on how the life appeared on Earth. Rather, on the contrary. The author scholastic and erudition is impressive on subjects from fundamental physics and chemistry up to polictics and language. Luisi included topics as difficult to define as self-organization and emergence, not only in the biological and biochemical context, but also in social behaviour and economics, for example. The text is crystal-clear, based mostly on arguments from others, but also by the author's personal thinkings based on a life long scientific carreer (over 300 scientific publications), first at the ETH-Zurich (Switzerland) then at Rome 3 (Italy). The book is strongly based on scientific support and thoroughly referenced (over 500 scientific references, including papers of scientific journals and books), and includes an excellent subject index. Graphs and figures are of good support to understand the text. I really recommend it for readers interested on the non-trivial hypotheses of life arousal on Earth. A point (?): Luisi does not include any religious discussion in his book. I was very pleased with his well balanced way of thinking.

How could life emerge from unanimate matter? Despite the importance of this question and its broad public interest, the field of research in origin-of-life is relatively undermined in the scientific community. This field doesn't offer a promising carrier for a young scientist, mainly because of its slow development and the fact that it doesn't benefit from recent technical progress, as is the case with other fields,
Therefore, as a result of its small scientific community, contrasted by its large public issue and demand, many books have been published on this topic, a wide range of which present chapters written by the same authors. The results is a great redundancy of information as well as scientific views. If you've read half a dozen books on the origin-of-life and you're looking for something fresher, more vibrant, which presents a new outlook on the subject, then stop looking, this is the book for you!

Pier Luigi Luisi is a chemist who has devoted his scientific carrier to this important question in modern biology. As author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications, he has covered a great deal of various approaches to the origin of life, as well as a multitude of other books on fields directly related to the subject, such as "Giant Vesicles" and "Self-Production of Supramolecular Structures" (also found in Amazon).

Luisi's "The Emergence of Life" is a systematic overview of the field, as seen from an insider. Each part of the big picture, from prebiotic soup to the minimal cell, is thoroughly divided into single chapters and given a critical review, each time carefully pointing out the weakness of our current ideas on the various steps of life evolving from matter. I think even a creationist could greatly benefit from this book as it will give him/her a large variety of arguments to criticize the "non-Intelligent Design approach" to the Origin of Life ;)

Each chapter ends with a few questions for the reader, many of which have a charming balance between philosophy and chemistry put into one sentence. For example, the first question in chapter 5 (which covers the topic of "Self-organization") is:
"Do you accept the idea that self-organization in prebiotic times was the main driving force for the formation of the first living cells? (If not, what would you add to the picture?)"

While his approach leads to more general philosophical problems, Luisi doesn't dodge these topics, rather, he deals with each and every one with great care, as in the case of the importance of the theory of autopoiesis in understanding consciousness (for the author's competance in this field, I would like to mention another book he has recently written: "Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality", which just received a positive review in Nature). While most of the book deals with serious chemical problems, philosophical topics are dealt with delicately and in a highly constructed manner, resulting in a book with both a wide range of scientific information as well as an extensive overview of the highly philosophical, ethical nature of this field.

I found this book to be an excellent review of the scientific literature that relates to the chemistry of the origin of life. The author brings forth the concepts and the relevant experiments to those concepts. His diagrams and graphs are a great help towards understanding. I used it as a textbook this past year for an introductory course in which one has at least a college sophmore's knowledge of chemistry and biology. I will be using it again. The more valuable aspect for me was the review of the literature.