So Simple a Beginning

How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World

By: Raghuveer Parthasarathy

Narrated by: Anand Jagatia

This audiobook narrated by Anand Jagatia reveals the hidden unity behind nature’s breathtaking complexity.

The form and function of a sprinting cheetah are quite unlike those of a rooted tree. A human being is very different from a bacterium or a zebra. The living world is a realm of dazzling variety, yet a shared set of physical principles shapes the forms and behaviors of every creature in it. So Simple a Beginning shows how the emerging new science of biophysics is transforming our understanding of life on Earth and enabling potentially lifesaving but controversial technologies such as gene editing, artificial organ growth, and ecosystem engineering.

Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains how four basic principles - self-assembly, regulatory circuits, predictable randomness, and scaling - shape the machinery of life on scales ranging from microscopic molecules to gigantic elephants. He describes how biophysics is helping to unlock the secrets of a host of natural phenomena, such as how your limbs know to form at the proper places, and why humans need lungs but ants do not. Parthasarathy explores how the cutting-edge biotechnologies of tomorrow could enable us to alter living things in ways both subtle and profound.

This sweeping tour of biophysics offers astonishing new perspectives on how the wonders of life can arise from so simple a beginning.

©2022 Raghuveer Parthasarathy (P)2022 Princeton University Press

Nano details, single DNA egg strand extraction

Beads on a String, The Who sings, to get us together like "Beads on a String" or DNA wrapped histones, described, by this writer as beads on a string.

Need to read again is ultimate praise. Easy to mistake new science as tough reading or writing. Taking a DNA strand, fixing cystic fibrosis, re-itntroducing it to follow an egg to a complex human.

Hear about nodules, becoming arms and legs.

A 30 second rewind is audio science delight! If you're a science lover this is new author also.

Biophysics and mechanobiology will have great new books coming. Life's Rachet, I think author Pullman?

If you enjoy genetics, physics, and math ...

I personally particularly enjoy books that make broad connections across math and science, like Geoffrey West's "Scale," Bill Bryson's "A Short History ...", and Strogratz's "Sync:..." If you have similar interests and a particular interest in genetics, "So Simple a Beginning" should be a great fit.

It's essentially two parts. The first half covers a few common themes that unify and permeate biology: self-assembly, predictable randomness, regulatory networks, and scale, I found discussions about how mathematical principles like Random Walks combined with physical properties like Reynolds Numbers and viscosity influence biological concerns like appendages for motion.

The second half focuses more squarely on genetics and genetics engineering with fairly lucid explanations of PCR (polymerase chain reaction), gene sequencing, CRISPR-based gene editing. and several other biotech buzzwords.

One particular note I found refreshing is that although, like many books on genetics, the author includes a fair bit of ethical discussion, he does so without overly pushing a particular moral or ethical worldview and instead seems to respect differing viewpoints.

I wish the first part of the book could have been a little longer, perhaps diving more into emergent phenomena, which he approaches with a couple of the four principles, but without ever outright using the term. It almost seems like memory mechanisms, as in immunity and DNA itself, are a fifth principle that allows continual accumulation of advances and increasingly complex emergent phenomena. But I suppose no such book is ever complete.

On the whole, a great job in a broad and interesting topic.