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Life on the Edge by Johnjoe McFadden & Jim Al-Khalili

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Life on the Edge

by Johnjoe McFadden & Jim Al-Khalili

Narrator Pete Cross

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Length 12 hours 39 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the authors
About the narrator

Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how did it come to be? Even in an age of cloning and artificial biology, the remarkable truth remains: nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we still missing a vital ingredient in its creation? Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe Macfadden reveal the hitherto missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics and the strange phenomena that lie at the heart of this most mysterious of sciences. As they brilliantly demonstrate here, life lives on the quantum edge.

Religion Science & Technology Nonfiction Social Science

Johnjoe McFadden is Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey and is the editor of several leading text books. For over a decade, he has specialized in examining tuberculosis and meningitis, inventing the first successful molecular test for the latter.

Jim Al-Khalili is a quantum physicist, author, and broadcaster. The leading theoretical physicist at the University of Surrey in England, he earned his PhD in theoretical nuclear physics in 1989. He has presented several television and radio documentaries, including the BAFTA-nominated Chemistry: A Volatile History. The author of over hundred research papers, he has written many popular science books, including Quantum. In 2016, he received the inaugural Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication.

Pete Cross is an award-winning audiobook narrator and engineer who earned his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. A multiple Earphones Awards winner and Audie finalist, he was nominated for a SOVAS award for his narration of Moby Dick and received the 2022 Audie Award for Ryan La Sala’s Be Dazzled and the 2023 Odyssey Award for Ryan La Sala’s The Honeys.