Table of Contents

1: Introduction: Elixir of Life - and Death
2: In the Beginning there was no Oxygen: The Origins and Importance of Oxygen
3: Silence of the Aeons: Three Billion Years of Microbial Evolution
4: Fuse to the Cambrian Explosion: Snowball Earth, Environmental Change and the First Animals
5: The Bolsover Dragonfly: Oxygen and the Rise of the Giants
6: Treachery in the Air: Oxygen Poisoning and X-Irradiation: A Mechanism in Common
7: Green Planet: Radiation and the Beginnings of Photosynthesis
8: Looking for LUCA: Last Ancestor in the Age Before Oxygen
9: Portrait of a Paradox: Vitamin C and the Many Faces of an Antioxidant
10: The Antioxidant Machine: A Hundred and One Ways of Living with Oxygen
11: Sex and the Art of Bodily Maintenance: Trade-offs in the Evolution of Ageing
12: Eat! Or You'll Live Forever: The Triangle of Food, Sex, and Longevity
13: Gender Bender! The Rate of Living and the Need for Sexes
14: Beyond Genes and Destiny: The Double Agent Theory of Ageing and Disease
15: Life, Death and Oxygen: Lessons From Evolution on the Future of Ageing

About the Author

Nick Lane studied biochemistry at Imperial College, University of London. His doctoral research, at the Royal Free Hospital, was on oxygen free-radicals and metabolic function in organ transplants. Dr Lane is Honorary Reader at University College London and strategic director at Adelphi Medi Cine, a medical multimedia company based in London, where he is responsible for developing interactive approaches to medical education. Articles by Nick Lane have been
published in numerous international journals, including Scientific American, The Lancet and the British Medical Journal. He lives in London.

Reviews

`'. . . popular science writing at its very best - clear yet challenging, speculative yet rigorous. The book is a tour de force which orchestrates a seamless story out of both venerable ideas and very recent discoveries in several disparate fields.''
Bernard Dixon
`'. . . a breathtaking, broad vision of the role of a single gas in our life, from the origin of organisms, through the emergence of creatures, and to their deaths . . . packed full of interesting life-and-death stories...A wonderful read.'
'
Peter Atkins
`'. . . one of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read.''
John Emsley
`Nick Lane's chapters are dispatches from the frontiers of research into Earth and life history, but they contain nothing that will lose the patient reader and much that will reward.'
The Guardian Review
`a brisk revelatory study'
Christopher Hirst, The Independent
`. . . Nick Lane marshals an impressive array of evidence - [an] ambitious narrative . . . This is science writing at its best.'
Jerome Burne, The Financial Times