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How the Krebs cycle powers life and death – with Nick Lane

The Royal Institution · 389.5K views · 2022-08-04 · 55:59

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Overview

Biochemist Nick Lane gives a Royal Institution lecture arguing that the Krebs cycle is central to what makes cells alive, not just genetic information. He draws on the themes of his book Transformer to link metabolism to the origin of life, death, and aging.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to Nick Lane as an excellent science communicator whose talks on mitochondria and the chemistry of life are worth watching.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2022–2026

Topics

Biology & biotechnologyEvolution & geneticsMedicine & infectious disease
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krebs cyclemitochondriaorigin of lifenick lanemetabolism

What people said

wfn · 2025-05 · Recommendation

I've read part of Nick Lane's other book, The Vital Question , cannot comment on this new one; TL;DR competent biochemist (from complete amateur standpoint at any rate), excellent science communicator; you can watch some of his talks online. e.g. the one linked on this new book's page is good: [VIDEO] He's really fascinated by the overall transformation process of inorganic matter -> organic matter, a sort of scientific fixation - which is always enjoyable when it's done by a competent scientist - and it's really captivating stuff. (The fact I haven't finished his previous book has nothing to do with the book material itself, if anything it really captivated me; it's just my not-amazing new habit of not finishing books...)

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AareyBaba · 2022-08 · Recommendation

You can watch his presentations at the Royal Institute. How the Krebs cycle powers life and death - [VIDEO] Why is Life the Way it Is? [LINK]

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morphle · 2026-04 · Reference

The research into the origen of life looks at bottom up fundamentals (how they work) of all cells since the solar system was formed. You could start with the slides in this lecture and read the underlying papers and all the references in all those papers. You probably can find these references also in all the books he wrote. [VIDEO] Maybe an educational text for the laymen has summarised this recently but I'm not aware of one. Most Biology from your school days have been rewritten.

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Sources

Video by The Royal Institution, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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