Two showstoppers in one day

Here is a very old post that was written but never posted...

I have begun reading The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life. Frankly I was not expecting anything powerful. It is one of those books that you pick up because you are tripping about its subject matter then. (I have just emerged from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species and a consequent rereading of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene).

So when I opened The Way of the Cell, I was foolish to judge before reading, not just the book but its author too. After all, Franklin M Harold is not exactly a household name like Darwin and Dawkins are.

Nevertheless, Harold has stunned me: Twice. That too in the first 10 pages that I have managed so far!

Every now and then we come across books that become difficult to read only because they are so well written. Because they make you stop and wonder so often that you cannot read fast enough.

Consider this showstopper...

‘Like a flame or an eddy, an organism is not an object so much as a process, sustained by the continuous passage through it of both matter and energy.’

Now you see why it is difficult to continue after such poetry, bang in the middle of a lecture on molecular biology.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger coined the word ‘negentropy’ to describe living matter’s habit of flouting the second law of thermodynamics. Even if you are like Harold, someone who has spent years worrying about bioenergetics, it is unlikely that you would think of flames and eddy currents as serious metaphors for life!

The second showstopper is not actually the words of Harold, but those of Hilaire Belloc. The quotation opens chapter 2:

‘The man behind the microscope
Has this advice for you:
Never ask what something Is
Just ask, what does it Do?’

Now this one was a total digression for me.

I design and run Internet products and services for a living. Very often we quibble too much about the position, colour, size or any such quality of a single tiny feature of a Web page. The devil, truly, is in the detail.

So, the next time the team is squinting through a microscope, pondering over a tiny feature of a Web page, the answer will come from a simple question: ‘Just ask, what does it Do?’

I hope the rest of the book is as rewarding as the first 10 pages are.