Summary of Carl Zimmer's Life's Edge

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I felt my own life, as well as the lives of others, as I made my way down the hairpin road. I could feel the steep slope in my legs, and I was aware of the nerves in my skin sensing the humidity and temperature of the air around me.
#2 I visited a laboratory in La Jolla, California, that was studying the kelp neuron. The kelp had the kind of complexity that marks living things, but I couldn’t say whether it was still alive. I couldn’t ask it how its day was going.
#3 The lab where Trujillo worked was led by another scientist from Brazil named Alysson Muotri. He grew neurons from people with a hereditary form of autism called Rett syndrome. The neurons spread their kelp-like branches across petri dishes and made contact with each other.
#4 Scientists were able to grow brain organoids in 2013, and they have been growing them ever since. They are able to see how the organoids develop, and they believe that they are developing more like our own brains.

Sujets

• Biological Diversity
• Life science

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 24 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669359494
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Carl Zimmer's Life's Edge
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I felt my own life, as well as the lives of others, as I made my way down the hairpin road. I could feel the steep slope in my legs, and I was aware of the nerves in my skin sensing the humidity and temperature of the air around me.

#2

I visited a laboratory in La Jolla, California, that was studying the kelp neuron. The kelp had the kind of complexity that marks living things, but I couldn’t say whether it was still alive. I couldn’t ask it how its day was going.

#3

The lab where Trujillo worked was led by another scientist from Brazil named Alysson Muotri. He grew neurons from people with a hereditary form of autism called Rett syndrome. The neurons spread their kelp-like branches across petri dishes and made contact with each other.

#4

Scientists were able to grow brain organoids in 2013, and they have been growing them ever since. They are able to see how the organoids develop, and they believe that they are developing more like our own brains.

#5

When the organoids were sent into space, they survived and were able to be observed by the astronauts. They were able to tell the scientists that the organoids were alive and functioning normally in space.

#6

The researchers were able to figure out how Zika viruses wreak havoc in the brain, and created drugs to block them. They were able to grow brain organoids that resembled the brain more and more as they grew.

#7

Scientists have created baby brains in a lab, and they are not even close to being human. They are far too simple to be considered a brain, and yet they are alive. Where do you start to approach that line.

#8

We are still trying to understand what makes brain organoids so different from actual brains, and whether or not they are alive. People have reported having a condition called Cotard’s syndrome, where they believe they are dead but still have a functioning brain.

#9

Our brains are tuned to life, and we can recognize it quickly because we only need a small amount of information to trigger biological circuits. We can also recognize life beyond our own skin, as we can recognize other living things.

#10

Our sense of living things is far older than our species. Experiments have shown that animals can make some of the same distinctions between the living and the nonliving that we do.

#11

The belief that the beginning of life is the journey from another world, as seen in the Beng of the Ivory Coast, gave birth to customs and laws around pregnancy. The Romans believed that a human life began with its first breath, while Christian theologians believed that fetuses had souls, which meant that abortion was a crime.

#12

For centuries, abortion was a common practice in the United States. But in the 1900s, anti-vice crusaders and doctors began to warn of the dangers of abortions, which tempted women into sinful lives.

#13

The Supreme Court ruling on abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1973 stated that criminalizing abortion violated a woman’s right to privacy. States could restrict abortions only in the first trimester, after a fetus became viable to survive outside the womb.

#14

The personhood movement’s politics have always been clear that the slogan life begins at conception was not meant to be taken literally. They are referring to a human life, with all of its legal protections.

#15

The actual course of human development makes it impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when a new human individual is formed. The moment of fertilization, when a sperm meets an egg, does not produce a single new genome. The two sets of chromosomes remain separate until the two-cell embryo, at which point the two sets of DNA join together.

#16

The risk of an embryo not ending up with twenty-three pairs of chromosomes is the biggest threat to its survival. Some embryos may end up with just one copy of a chromosome, leaving them unable to make all the proteins they need to survive.

#17

Some abortion opponents have questioned the estimates of the number of lives lost due to abortion, claiming that the causes of these lost pregnancies are unstoppable. But this is not true. A great deal of research has gone into reducing pregnancy losses.

#18

Scientists have turned the skin cells of adult mice into mouse embryos, which can grow into mouse pups. It may soon be possible to do the same with humans. When that happens, trillions of cells in each of our bodies will gain the potential to become a human being.

#19

The story of the lamentably moaning monkey was so remarkable that people in England repeated it for decades. It seemed to fly in the face of what Victorians thought about the animal brain. Humans could make sense of life, thanks to their rational minds.

#20

The first modern record of primates facing death came in the 1960s from Jane Goodall, who lived with chimpanzees in Tanzania.