Life on the edge : the coming of age of quantum biology / Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili.

"Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain as Life on the Edge by Bantam Press, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd. in 2014."--Title page verso.

Includes bibliographic references and index.

Introduction -- What is life? -- The engines of life -- The quantum beat -- Finding Nemo's home -- The butterfly, the fruit fly and the quantum robin -- Quantum genes -- Mind -- How life began -- Quantum biology: life on the edge of a storm -- Epilogue: quantum life.

Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how does it work? It is remarkable that in this age of cloning and even synthetic biology, nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we missing a vital ingredient in its creation? Like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene which provided a new perspective on evolution by shifting the focus of natural selection from organisms to genes, Life On The Edge alters our understanding of life from cells or biomolecules to the fundamental particles that drive life's dynamics. From this new perspective, life makes more sense as its missing ingredient is revealed to be quantum mechanics and the strange phenomena that lie at the heart of this most mysterious of sciences.