Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
By Nick Lane
WW Norton 2022

Transformer, the latest book from biochemist and professor of evolutionary biochemistry Nick Lane, is at heart about something called the Krebs cycle, which is informally named after biochemist Sir Hans Krebs and describes the chemical processes at the heart of both anaerobic and aerobic respiration. To write about the Krebs cycle at all is necessarily to oversimplify it, but it’s fair to say this process is what separates being alive from being dead.

This touches on some elemental concepts, and Lane is fine with that. He’s devoted this entire book to explaining an incredibly complex chemical cycle to a general reading public that’s more scientifically illiterate than any in over a century (in 2022, roughly 83 million Americans think the sun revolves around the Earth); if he doesn’t want the whole of Transformer to read like this: “The enzyme that catalyses the interconversion of isocitrate into a-ketoglutarate is known as isocitrate dehydrogenase,” he’s going to have to do plenty of this kind of elemental generalizing: “To understand this cycle of energy and matter is to resolve the deep chemical coherence of the living world, connecting the origin of life with the devastation of cancer, the first photosynthetic bacteria with our own mitochondria, the abrupt evolutionary leap to animals with sulfurous sludge, the big history of our planet with the trivial differences between ourselves, perhaps even the stream of consciousness.” 

In Transformer, Lane indulges in a great many of the banes of popular science writing (derived, one feels certain, from pandering to slab-faced phone-scrollers in lecture halls), including the creaky dad-slang that has stuff like “the dark side,” “the flux capacitor,” and “fake news” cropping up throughout the book. These kinds of over-earnest attempts to defang a complicated subject are an enduring mystery; the people who need them won’t read the book, and the people who’ll read the book don’t need them. But here they are, like your awkward uncle on TikTok. 

Fortunately, Lane’s discussion of “the deep chemistry that animates life” is itself very winningly animated, and that saves it from both its own dorkiness and from the mind-breakingly abstruse nature of its subject matter. Lane’s personal excitement about the biochemistry in these pages goes a long way toward making that biochemistry comprehensible even to readers whose closest approach to chemistry in college was reading about Rimbaud’s affection for absinthe. In large part this is done through personalities; Transformer is as much about the people investigating the Krebs cycle as it is about the cycle itself. Watch the exquisite balance of personal and professional, for instance, in Lane’s memories of his friend Salvador Moncada:

Cancer cells growing in culture can be checked in their mad career through the cell cycle by depriving them of glucose or glutamine. Around the time we were talking, Moncada had just shown that depriving cells of glucose did not pause their growth for long, but depriving them of glutamine put paid to their prospects permanently. And now, here he was, chalk in hand, eyes sparkling, drawing arrows spiralling out from the Krebs cycle into cytosol. Flux in reverse to citrate. Export, then break down to acetyl CoA and oxaloacetate. Thence pyruvate and lactate. Not from glucose at all, but glutamine. And on. It was dizzying, a prelude to the coming storm. I regret the storm was not of Moncada’s making. He left UCL soon afterwards, to direct a new Institute for Cancer Studies at the University of Manchester; but whenever I think of glutamine, I can’t help but see Moncada pacing urgently before his blackboard. Molecules acquire personality this way.

That kind of personality pervades the book and makes it, against all odds, consistently fascinating reading. True, Lane’s biochemist zeal often gets the better of him; he often writes some variation of “you can probably see where I’m going with this,” and it’s never actually true. But the gap is never fatal, no matter how many oxidative prongs he hurls at your head.

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.