Review: Life as It Is by William Loomis

WHAT life is and how we should treat it have provoked academic and popular interest since antiquity. For much of that time the gap between the discovered and the popularly “known” was fairly bridgeable. The speed of biotechnological advance and the vigour of religious propaganda, argues Loomis, means this is no longer true. In this wide-ranging, easily accessible and thought-provoking book, he considers life and its implications from a cell biologist’s viewpoint, pursuing the ubiquity of life’s splendour and how we should relate to this philosophically, ethically and in public policy, covering issues from abortion to engineered evolution. This profound…