The big issues

“To truly understand life, we must understand spatial and temporal relationships between molecules that make up the cell, and how these molecules are coordinated. [Antoine] Danchin persuades us that if we can reach this level of understanding of genomes, we will be able to resolve the major biological puzzle of the 21st century: the enigma of the living machine that creates the living machine,” promises Harvard University Press. Danchin is at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and his The Delphic Boat (Harvard, February) tackles the big question: “What is life?” Biologist Marcello Barbieri looks at a multiplicity of organic codes in his “semantic biology” – the…