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The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life First Edition

by Franklin M. Harold (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 36 ratings
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What is life? Fifty years after physicist Erwin Schrodinger posed this question in his celebrated and inspiring book, the answer remains elusive. In The Way of the Cell, one of the world's most respected microbiologists draws on his wide knowledge of contemporary science to provide fresh insight into this intriguing and all-important question.
What is the relationship of living things to the inanimate realm of chemistry and physics? How do lifeless but special chemicals come together to form those intricate dynamic ensembles that we recognize as life? To shed light on these questions, Franklin Harold focuses here on microorganisms--in particular, the supremely well-researched bacterium E. coli--because the cell is the simplest level of organization that manifests all the features of the phenomenon of life. Harold shows that as simple as they appear when compared to ourselves, every cell displays a dynamic pattern in space and time, orders of magnitude richer than its elements. It integrates the writhings and couplings of billions of molecules into a coherent whole, draws matter and energy into itself, constructs and reproduces its own order, and persists in this manner for numberless generations while continuously adapting to a changing world.
A cell constitutes a unitary whole, a unit of life, and in this volume one of the leading authorities on the cell gives us a vivid picture of what goes on within this minute precinct. The result is a richly detailed, meticulously crafted account of what modern science can tell us about life as well as one scientist's personal attempt to wring understanding from the tide of knowledge.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0195163389
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0195163384
  3. Edition
    First Edition
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  5. Publication date
    June 5, 2003
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    9.25 x 6.16 x 0.92 inches
  8. Print length
    305 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The work is like a breath of fresh air in a scientific world otherwise obsessed with excessive reductionism."--BioEssays

"Witty and erudite, this scientific book hails as a literary achievement. Comprehensive and up to date, Franklin Harold traces the roots--historical, thermodynamic, and biochemical--of today's biological revolution."--Lynn Margulis, co-author (with Dorion Sagan) of both What is Life? and What is Sex?

"This book helps us understand why the search for answers to the riddle 'What is life?' is a noble quest."--Howard C. Berg, author of Random Walks in Biology

Book Description

An intriguing look at life in its most elemental form--the single cell

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; First Edition (June 5, 2003)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 305 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0195163389
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0195163384
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1370L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.25 x 6.16 x 0.92 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 36 ratings

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Franklin M. Harold

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4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
36 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Aufton Wunderbar
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books on cells and molecular biology for the general public
Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2014
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BUY THIS BOOK!. I've read a number of popular books in this area, the Harold's is the best. It is excellent at explaining the details, (without too much detail) so you have a concrete idea of the mechanism, but his overviews of the broader issues really shine. I found reading it and being truly amazed by the organization, energy flow, and process of life below the level we encounter day to day. It's a book I look forward to re-reading. I wish he would update it to 2014 to cover more fully epigenetic, synthetic biology, and the like.
6 people found this helpful
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lefterisbax
4.0 out of 5 stars Very dense book, asking some great questions
Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2021
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Packed with really good information, but also asking the WHYs, not just the regular textbook descriptions, trying to examine systems and processes from the top down approach, ie. why things are the way they are, Complexity and Emergence vs reductionism, which for me is the better way.
I personally found his writing style though, too 'messy', not a good storyteller, not engaging for the reader, but hey, this is common in science books.
Also, I would disagree on the chapter about Entropy. Life is a continuous fight against the 2nd law, and in the end we always lose... Energy dissipation can lower entropy, but it's not a characteristic of living things, as it happens all over the non-living universe, it is how planets are formed from random dust, creating an orderly system, with the aid of gravity, therefore lowering entropy.
But then again, who can define what Life is...
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Kapduva
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb
Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2015
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This is a superb book. Not only is it a highly informative tour of the subject area, packed with information for the uninitiated, the ideas, judgment and intellectual integrity of the author shine through, as does his committment to his discipline and his love for the mysteries of nature. Whether or not one accepts the particular views advanced, the author's efforts reflected in this book provide a useful reminder of what is best in science.
3 people found this helpful
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J. Chaffin
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2015
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great book
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Dennis Littrell
5.0 out of 5 stars Difficult, profound; worth the reader's best efforts
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2002
Time and again in this dense, intensely scientific exposition on cellular life, Professor Harold expresses his dissatisfaction with what he calls the "genocentric" view of life. Instead he would like to see a "focus on the cellular templet rather than the molecular gene." He believes this would represent "a significant divergence from the genocentric conception of life that now dominates the scientific literature and even more so, the popular press." (p. 100) Harold makes a strong case for his point of view; indeed, it is this book more than any other that has made me see the overriding influence the immediate molecular environment has on reproduction and growth.
The genome has its "recipe," its code of instructions, but what Harold is at pains to tell us is that without the four-dimensional cellular environment in which the gene's "instructions" are carried out in a step-by-step process, there would be no growth or reproduction.
What this means is that the shape and temperature, the position and abundance of the surrounding cellular elements themselves shape the genetic expression as much as or even more than the genome. All life comes from life. All cells come from cells. There is no acting out of the genetic code outside a cellular environment.
And so we see Harold's frustration and that of other molecular biologists at all the hoopla that has accompanied the sequencing of the genome when it is clear that reading the code is just a very small step toward understanding how the cell reproduces itself and grows. What we need to understand is the intricate environment of the cell and how it interacts with the code leading to the epigenetic assembly of the cell and ultimately of the organism. The complications inherent in such an enterprise are truly mind-boggling in the extreme. Analysis of the four-dimensional factors would overwhelm the fastest computers in existence--all of them at the same time--if somehow we could figure out how to employ them to aid our analysis.
These facts explain why scientists like Harold are insistent upon a holistic approach to biology and why they again and again warn about the limitations of a reductionist approach. Life is just too complicated to be understood by breaking it down into pieces and attempting to put it back together, or to reverse engineer it.
On page 213 there is an interesting comparison of E. O. Wilson's view that there is "progress" in evolution and Stephen J. Gould's emphatic view that there is not. Harold seems to be implying that because organisms have become more complex that there is indeed at least "direction" in evolution. I would go further than this and observe that the rise of complex culture-bearing organisms like humans, who may be able to protect their home planet from a death-dealing meteor, implies if not "progress" in evolution, something equally agreeable. However, I would not say that our rise was inevitable. Indeed, along with Gould I would call it a contingency.
Much of the book, especially chapters three through eight, is a technical exploration of the microbial world of the cell using concepts and terminology not readily accessible to the lay reader. Harold is aware of this, at least for Chapter 4, "Molecular Logic," where he writes on page 35, "...students of biochemistry will find little in [the chapter]...that is new to them, but for the layman it may be like sipping water from a firehose." (!) Professor Harold provides a glossary, but one suspects one is out of one's depth when the words searched for are not in the glossary, but can be found in an ordinary dictionary!
Nonetheless the broad outlines of Harold's message can be discerned without appreciating fully the intricacies of cell metabolism and development. The introductory chapters, "Schrödinger's Riddle" and "The Quality of Life" explore the question that physicist Erwin Schrödinger famously asked in his much admired little book, What Is Life? (1944), a book that very much impressed the young Franklin Harold. In the closing chapters, beginning with Chapter 9 "By Descent with Modification," and especially the engaging Chapter 10 "So What is Life?", Harold looks more generally at evolution. He touches on the new science of complexity and how it relates to biology, and on the thermodynamics of ecosystems and how that affects natural selection. His treatment of some of the controversies in evolutionary theory is both illuminating and balanced, so much so that one would like to quote whole passages. This is obviously a subject Professor Harold has thought long and hard about for many years. Here are some examples of his thought:
"...[F]orm is not directly or rigidly determined by the genotype: the genes define a range within which the phenotype falls, but forms arise epigenetically as the result of developmental processes." (p. 209)
"Organisms are historical creatures, the products of evolution; we should not expect to deduce all their properties from universal laws." (p. 218)
"What we lack is an understanding of the principles that ultimately make living organisms living, and in their absence we cannot hope to integrate the phenomenon of life into the familiar framework of physical law. I am not here to advocate a veiled vitalism, nor to sneak in a creator by the back door. But...until we have forged rational links between the several domains of science, our understanding of life will remain incomplete and even superficial." (p. 218)
"...[W]hile a machine implies a machine maker, an organism is a self-organizing entity." (p. 220)
"Organisms process matter and energy as well as information; each represents a dynamic node in a whirlpool of several currents, and self-reproduction is a property of the collective, not of genes.... DNA is a peculiar sort of software, that can only be correctly interpreted by its own unique hardware.... [S]ending aliens the genome of a cat is no substitute for sending the cat itself--complete with mice." (p. 221)
33 people found this helpful
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Sandra L. Ortiz
4.0 out of 5 stars So much to learn: so little time.
Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2015
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Excellent primer in cellular biology. I learned a lot: I mean A LOT, and without having to work my way through equations, complicated graphics, or drag out my old chemistry books. Feel like I have a much better understanding than previously. For instance, I was amazed to learn that DNA is not "alive", in fact atoms and molecules may be the building blocks of life, but they are NOT life itself. Very cool stuff.
6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Wandering
5.0 out of 5 stars Almost a philosophy of biology
Reviewed in Canada on January 9, 2023
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A description of contemporary molecular biology, a reflection on the nature of life, and a program for young researchers looking for promising research paths.

The audience for this book would be an active biologist, student, or interested reader. In order to appreciate the full effect of many of the arguments and examples, however, the reader should have a basic understanding of molecular biology -- the structure of proteins, the "central dogma" of DNA to RNA to ribosome to protein, and some very basic cell physiology (membrane function, function of principle organelles, etc.).

I am in the latter category. I would strongly recommend that a student of biology read this twice: once at the same time as the first course in cell and molecular biology, and once at the end of the course.
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TheRecluse
4.0 out of 5 stars Good book on the subject.
Reviewed in India on April 23, 2018
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This was a good but challenging read. Covers a lot of contents. Was disappointed a little with having received the book with no book jacket.
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djb
5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond the genome
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 21, 2009
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Bio-chemistry has identified the molecular mechanics of life... DNA, RNA, enzyme activities, metabolic cycles etc....but Harold argues that "a satisfying reading of lifes riddle demands a rational account of biological organisation....a cell is more than an aggregate of individual molecules; it is an organised, structured purposeful and evolved whole". How did formal organisation evolve? "The genetic program has been the focus...but...the fallacy is the tacit assumption...that all the levels of biological order are spelled out in the genome....the cell provides the context for the expression of that network".
Cells beget cells.Structure begets structure.Organelles beget organelles.
Excellent book. Great read. Superb.
4 people found this helpful
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Sam Flot
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book. It took me quite a long time ...
Reviewed in Canada on January 5, 2017
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Great book. It took me quite a long time to get through this book but
I am glad I did and learned a lot.
One person found this helpful
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Adam Southworth
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 17, 2016
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Great product, thanks.
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