For him, the key to cancer (as to so much else) is metabolism: it is shifts in cellular metabolism, not genetic mutations, that explain why our risk of cancer increases so drastically as we age. Our understanding of the disease, like our understanding of life, has been skewed by an undue emphasis on genes, says Lane. Lane brings the story up to date by delving into the role of Krebs in cancer. He also argues that alterations in the cycle may have been key to the blossoming of animal diversity during the Cambrian explosion some 540 million years ago. Moving through the history of life, Lane illustrates the deep links between the reverse Krebs and photosynthesis, which, in turn, led to Earth’s air becoming rich in oxygen for the first time – paving the way for the modern Krebs, which requires oxygen. He draws on recent experiments suggesting that parts of the reverse Krebs (and at least some of the forwards Krebs) can happen without complex biochemicals to shepherd them along, and may therefore be primordial.

Lane makes the case that it dates back to the very earliest life, which he believes arose in hydrothermal vents on the seabed. For one thing, the cycle can run backwards, and this reverse Krebs seems to be much older than the “forwards” one. The many functions of the Krebs cycle mean it can explain much about life, Lane argues. Lane compares it to a furiously busy roundabout, with different vehicles constantly whizzing in from different junctions and hurtling out on others. And cells can run it in various ways, so there is no one Krebs cycle.

But Krebs is also a chemical factory, manufacturing key components of cells. Textbooks, he says, essentially treat it as a mechanism for obtaining energy from food. Lane’s thesis is that biochemists have misunderstood the cycle and therefore underestimated it.

It is named for biochemist Hans Krebs, who described many details of how it works. Its focus is a biochemical process called the Krebs cycle: a whirlwind of chemistry that spins around in all our cells many times a second. In his last book, The Vital Question, he argued that many of these seemingly disparate mysteries could be explained by life’s reliance on electrically charged particles to power itself. One of the most creative of today’s biologists, his work ranges from the evolution of sex and the rise of planetary oxygen to the origin of complex cells and the first life on Earth. Lane’s focus on energy and the essential dynamism of life has been an important thread running through his research. Quoting the poem Like Most Revelations by Richard Howard, he writes that “it is the movement that creates the form”. So argues biochemist and writer Nick Lane in his new book Transformer. IF WE want to understand the nature of life, we have to think about the flow of energy and matter.

Transformer nick lane