I’m 27% of the way through this long book. The grammar is exceptionally remarkable for transitioning complex molecular biology into layman’s language — so that non-scientists (and EVEN PHYSICIAN) can understand. Author Sinclair is an Australian who has a lab at Harvard University and a start-up company called Elysium that sells a product (NMN; nicotinamide mononucleotide) guaranteed to make you live 20 years longer with no signs of aging. 😊😉
—D
Here is an excerpt which makes one humble:
Turns out, there is no new law required to explain life. At the nanoscale, it is merely an ordered set of chemical reactions, concentrating and assembling atoms that would normally never assemble, or breaking apart molecules that would normally never disintegrate. Life does this using proteinaceous Pac-Men called enzymes made up of coils and layer mats of amino acid chains.
Enzymes make Life possible by taking advantage of fortuitous molecular movements. Every second you are alive, thousands of glucose molecules are captured within each of your trillions of cells by an enzyme called glucokinase, which fuses glucose moleules to phosphorus atoms, tagging them for energy production. Most of the energy created is used by a multicomponent RNA and protein complex called a ribosome, whose primary job is to capture amino acids and fuse them with other amino acids to make fresh proteins.
Think of an enzyme (e.g., catalase) which has the largest turnover frequency, with values up to 4 × 107 sec−1 having been reported. This boggles the mind (all these things happening in the time space of 1 nanosecond in each cell). This is creating ORDER from CHAOS. And only Gibbs Free Energy (and God) are capable of this phenomenon…
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Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To
By David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. LaPlante