The diversity of life makes it hard to encapsulate, yet this accessible treatment from a seasoned biologist offers readers a fresh twin-track insight into the nature of life through the prism of individual, mortal existence, and ongoing genomic collectivity.

Life is a diverse and ubiquitous phenomenon on Earth, characterized by fundamental features distinguishing living bodies from nonliving material. Yet it is also so complex that it has long defied precise definition. This book from a seasoned biologist offers new insights into the nature of life by illuminating a fascinating architecture of dualities inherent in its existence and propagation. Life is connected with individual living beings, yet it is also a collective and inherently global phenomenon of the material world. It embodies a dual existence of cycles of phenotypic life, and their unseen driver an uninterrupted march of genetic information whose collective immortality is guaranteed by individual mortality. Although evolution propagates and tunes species of organisms, the beings produced can be regarded merely as tools for the survival and cloning of genomes written in an unchanging code. What are the physical versus informational bases and driving forces of life, and how do they unite as an integrated system? What does time mean for individuals, life on the global scale, and the underlying information? This accessible examination of principles and evidence shows that a network of dualities lies at the heart of biological puzzles that have engaged the human mind for millennia.

Novel attempt to explain the driving forces of life Accessible treatment of many fundamental questions about the living state Provides much food for thought, for laypersons and scientists alike Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Autorentext

Prof. GennadiyZhegunov holds a doctorate in biological sciences. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Biology of Kharkov National University. From 1975 to 1995 he worked at the Institute of Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine in Kharkov. Prof. Zhegunov was the first to obtain experimental evidence of participation of genome of heterothermal animals in adaptation processes by restructuring the protein synthesis. From 1995 to 2002, he worked as professor and head of Department of Biology at Kharkov National Medical University. There he taught cell biology and genetics to medical students, and actively conducted the research on the effects of freezing on survival and levels of genomic anomalies in animal embryos at the early stages of development. Since 2002, he has been working as a professor, head of Department of Biochemistry at Kharkov State Veterinary Academy, which has been recently reformed into State Biotechnology University. His current research is connected to studying theeffects of freezing on blood cells of various domestic animals. Prof. Zhegunov is author and co-author of more than 200 scientific publications, 5 textbooks and 6 monographs. Dr. Denys Pogozhykh is actively working in the field of cryobiology and stem cell research since 2004. He has completed his PhD thesis in 2010 at the Institute for Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In 2011, he moved to Germany to continue his research in the field of low temperature biology at the Institute for Multiphase Processes of the Leibniz University of Hannover. Since 2012, Dr. Pogozhykh is working at the Hannover Medical School in Germany. His research is focused on the topics related to regenerative medicine and stem cell research, blood farming, thrombocytopenia and neutropenia, as well as developing of biobanking technologies for multipotent stromal cells, tissues, bioengineered constructs, and blood components. Dr. Pogozhykh is currently involved in the scientific evaluation of clinical and genetic analysis of the patients with orphan disease enrolled in the Severe Chronic Neutropenia International Registry.

Inhalt
The Phenomenon of Life. Essentials.- Living Bodies Carriers of Life.- How Life Works Mechanisms and Processes of Living Bodies.- Mechanisms of the Invisible World of Information.- Duality of Life.