About Carl Zimmer
Carl Zimmer is an award-winning science writer. His latest book is ” Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. ” He’s also a columnist for the New York Times and a frequent contributor on Radiolab.
In his books, Zimmer travels to the frontiers of biological research, to discover how scientists are expanding our understanding of the natural world and ourselves. His books include “Parasite Rex,” “Evolution: The Triumph of An Idea,” “Soul Made Flesh,” and “A Planet of Viruses.”
Zimmer began his career at Discover, where he ended up as a senior editor. After publishing his first book, “At the Water’s Edge,” Zimmer became a full-time writer, contributing to magazines including National Geographic, The Atlantic, and Wired. Zimmer began contributing to the New York Times in 2004, and in 2013 he launched “Matter,” a weekly column on everything from Neanderthal DNA to the future of life on Earth.
Among his awards, Zimmer has earned the National Academies Communication Award and the Stephen Jay Gould Prize. He is a three-time winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award. Zimmer is a professor adjunct at Yale, where he teaches writing. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.
Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world—from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses—the harder they find it is to locate life’s edge.
Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life in other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts—whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.
Life’s Edge is an utterly fascinating investigation that no one but one of the most celebrated science writers of our generation could craft. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to re-create life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It’s never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply. Have they made life in the lab?
Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.
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