The touchstone of life

The advent of computers has led to a new way of looking at scientific subjects - in terms of the flow of information. In The Touchstone of Life Werner Loewenstein uses this viewpoint to look at the behaviour of cells and so the nature of living things. The book is in three parts. The first introduces the concepts required, and then goes on to look at the origin of life in terms of networks of chemical reactions. The second part looks at information flow within living cells - at how the instructions coded for in DNA are carried out, and at the workings of enzymes.

The third part looks at information flow between cells, and how this made possible the existence of multicellular organisms. The book makes much use of analogy and metaphor, putting across the subject in terms of stories about (Maxwellian) demons and the like. I wasn't so keen on this - I felt that sometimes it obscured the important content, and made the book overlong and wordy. However, if you can put up with this then you are likely to get a lot of benefit from this book, as it makes an advanced subject accessible to less technically minded readers.