《Life Unfolding How the Human Body Creates Itself》
by Jamie A. Davies (Author)
Hardcover: 312 pages
Publisher: OUP Oxford (27 Feb. 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0199673535
ISBN-13: 978-0199673537
Product Dimensions:23.6 x 3 x 16.8 cm
Where
did I come from? Why do I have two arms but just one head? How is my
left leg the same size as my right one? Why are the fingerprints of
identical twins not identical? How did my brain learn to learn? Why must
I die?
Questions like these remain biology's deepest and most
ancient challenges. They force us to confront a fundamental biological
problem: how can something as large and complex as a human body organize
itself from the simplicity of a fertilized egg? A convergence of ideas
from embryology, genetics, physics, networks, and control theory has
begun to provide real answers. Based on the central principle of
'adaptive self-organization', it explains how the interactions of many
cells, and of the tiny molecular machines that run them, can organize
tissue structures vastly larger than themselves, correcting errors as
they go along and creating new layers of complexity where there were
none before.
Life Unfolding tells the story of human
development from egg to adult, from this perspective, showing how our
whole understanding of how we come to be has been transformed in recent
years. Highlighting how embryological knowledge is being used to
understand why bodies age and fail, Jamie A. Davies explores the
profound and fascinating impacts of our newfound knowledge.
an
astonishingly lucid and captivating account of the strange construction
processes that lead from a single cell to a fully formed body (TLS, Asif A. Ghazanfar)
A demanding but wonder-filled account of the simple interactions that create complex structures. (New Scientist)
Since 1995, Jamie A. Davies has run his own laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, with a multi-disciplinary focus on discovering how mammalian organs construct themselves and how we can use this knowledge to build new tissues and organs for those in need. He has published around 90 research papers in the field of mammalian development, published a major specialist monograph, Mechanisms of Morphogenesis, and edited three multi-author books in the fields of development, stem cells, and tissue engineering. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Biologists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, and a Fellow of the HIgher Education Academy. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Organogenesis.
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