Life is a far richer, more complicated affair than we imagined

In 1982, the philosopher Karl Popper suggested that ‘science may be described as the art of systematic simplification’. In this mind-stretching book, Philip Ball seems to wish to prove Popper’s statement both wrong and correct.

On the one hand, Ball is a clarifier supreme. It is hard to imagine a more concise, coherent, if also challenging, single volume written on the discoveries made in the life sciences over the past 70 years. The author is a former editor of Nature and has been privy to the flow of cutting-edge results coming from the world’s leading research programmes over the past decades. How Life Works has a sense of up-to-the-minute authority.

Yet Ball is also deeply alive to the human story within his project, leavening technical matters with wit and humour. He opens with a synoptic history of the way thinkers from Aristotle onwards have characterised life’s operation. He digresses to incorporate many knotted cultural subplots which are embedded in the seemingly sterilised surfaces of the laboratory.

Erwin Schrödinger, now most famous for his dead-or-alive cat, is called out as a serial paedophile. Ball pauses to highlight his misogyny, which didn’t just denigrate the work of female colleagues but actually held back their respective fields – including that of the brilliant Nobel Laureate and geneticist Barbara McLintock. The same boorish sexism was exhibited by James Watson when he marginalised the contributions of the chemist Rosalind Franklin. Franklin’s groundbreaking crystallography work was pivotal to Crick and Watson’s uncovering of the double-helix structure of DNA. These stories – mere asides to the main drama – are nevertheless important to Ball because they show the human contingency at play in reason’s sphere.

Above all, he wishes to emphasise, in contradiction to Popper’s summary of science, how our discoveries about life are always more complicated than we can imagine.