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mattleesharp's review
2.0
maybe this book is secretly incredible for people who like the subject matter, but i found the material super dry and all of the speculative stuff toward the end a little lacking.
gijs's review against another edition
4.0
Backed by copious amounts of solid science, the subject is thoroughly fleshed out drawing on data from many scientific disciplines. Only downside is the author’s rather tepid writing style.
radbear76's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting but highly speculative. It also reminded me of how much I dislike chemistry.
jenn756's review
5.0
This is fascinating. A densely packed book – it took me months to finish, but worth it. It’s a review of oxygen, and begins as a history of early life on Earth explaining how early organisms began producing oxygen as a waste product thus making the atmosphere toxic to themselves but enabling a whole raft of new organisms to diversify and flourish. Then oxygen levels peaked eventually in the Carboniferous with the appearance of enormous insects.
After that Lane changes tack and the book continues by looking at the impact of oxygen on our bodies and our cellular systems. He writes this section with gusto, as obviously it’s his area of expertise, and I found this part much more interesting. It turns out oxygen’s role in our bodies is more complicated than assumed. True, we would die without it, but it is also a toxic element to us, so our system seems to spend most of its time regulating and directing the oxygen to the right places – mitochondria.
The real nub of the book is the impact of oxidation on the aging process. The theory is that as the body ages, we develop `leaky’ mitochondria which has a deleterious effect on cells. Cells have evolved to cope with this, but only up to a point and beyond that they begin to die or are damaged. And even the mechanism that has evolved to protect us from oxidation has a damaging effect on the cell in the long term – it’s an evolutionary trade-off between jam today and jam tomorrow, or breeding before longevity.
Lane contends that all the major diseases connected with aging – dementia, Parkinson’s, cancer, heart-disease – all have their roots in oxidation. And that really to conquer these we must look at the age-related diseases as a whole. Very interesting. I’m no biochemist so am not qualified to comment on this, but it is a stimulating hypothesis. The only proviso maybe, is that it was published in 2002 – a long time ago in biology terms.
Nick Lane writes very well, and has a knack of littering his writing with interesting analogies, which brings `Oxygen’ to life. For instance he calls a cell under oxidative stress a `war zone’ and stress proteins as `emergency services’ and so on. Good for anyone interested in biology and aging (much as aging is a somewhat depressing process for those of us well on the road to proliferating leaky mitochondria…)
After that Lane changes tack and the book continues by looking at the impact of oxygen on our bodies and our cellular systems. He writes this section with gusto, as obviously it’s his area of expertise, and I found this part much more interesting. It turns out oxygen’s role in our bodies is more complicated than assumed. True, we would die without it, but it is also a toxic element to us, so our system seems to spend most of its time regulating and directing the oxygen to the right places – mitochondria.
The real nub of the book is the impact of oxidation on the aging process. The theory is that as the body ages, we develop `leaky’ mitochondria which has a deleterious effect on cells. Cells have evolved to cope with this, but only up to a point and beyond that they begin to die or are damaged. And even the mechanism that has evolved to protect us from oxidation has a damaging effect on the cell in the long term – it’s an evolutionary trade-off between jam today and jam tomorrow, or breeding before longevity.
Lane contends that all the major diseases connected with aging – dementia, Parkinson’s, cancer, heart-disease – all have their roots in oxidation. And that really to conquer these we must look at the age-related diseases as a whole. Very interesting. I’m no biochemist so am not qualified to comment on this, but it is a stimulating hypothesis. The only proviso maybe, is that it was published in 2002 – a long time ago in biology terms.
Nick Lane writes very well, and has a knack of littering his writing with interesting analogies, which brings `Oxygen’ to life. For instance he calls a cell under oxidative stress a `war zone’ and stress proteins as `emergency services’ and so on. Good for anyone interested in biology and aging (much as aging is a somewhat depressing process for those of us well on the road to proliferating leaky mitochondria…)
futuregazer's review against another edition
5.0
Well written and informative. It is quite hard to find good science communicators these days, and although Mr. Lane sometimes has to get quite complex, I find that he always brings it back to a summary that makes it clear to folks of many academic levels how much they know and how much they don't. Which is great, because works that make people think they understand more than they do are often quite troublesome in the current day and age.
Hard to say if the ideas and hypotheses put forward by the book will pan out of course, but the writing is great, and the ideas intriguing.
Hard to say if the ideas and hypotheses put forward by the book will pan out of course, but the writing is great, and the ideas intriguing.
alex2_0's review against another edition
informative
relaxing
3.75
I liked the evolution part of the book more than the later chapters about prolonged life and aging illnesses.
From a chemical standpoint the effect of "radicals" on the body was q ite interesting.
From a chemical standpoint the effect of "radicals" on the body was q ite interesting.
randomprogrammer's review against another edition
3.0
Read in Summer of 2012, review from memory in 2023. This book was an absolute slog to get through, but I remeber it having an amazing scientific perspective. I was constantly learning new things and having my mind blown.