The stuff of life

‘I didn’t realise we were carbon,’ said a friend to whom I mentioned this book. She was the first of several. It’s odd to think of clever and educated people not knowing that we are made of such stuff. But The Many Lives of Carbon is an odd book to come to grips with. Its title promises plain speaking about carbon, which the book then delivers. Nothing to lose sleep over. Yet one does.

This is partly because it mines a rich seam. I fell asleep thinking about the carboniferous period, and dreamt I was one of the seven dwarfs, trapped underground with a pickaxe and a vile hod, and woke myself up with a sepulchral groan of horror, which woke the dog, and there was nothing for it but to go downstairs and put the kettle on.

The thing about the book, I realised in the kitchen, was that the loop — the carbon loop — is all-entwining. Where do you start? Cellular processes? The cultural history of the diamond (protection against plague)? The Krebs cycle? Or just the kitchen, warm because of the central heating, which was gas-powered, which was carbon. The kettle was electric, which came from a carbon-fuelled power station. The tea was a carbon-based life form, now dead, and the dog was a carbon-based life form, alive and singing cheerfully. I was writing in my notebook with a pencil, which is graphite, which is carbon, and I was doing so in my role as another carbon-based life form, though not singing. Indeed, while it’s possible to imagine another sort of life form, non-carbon-based (replication and, arguably, random mutation are the two necessary behaviours for the diagnosis of life), it’s hard to do it without the echo of Scotty murmuring: ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.