Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Carl Zimmer, "Life's Edge: The Search For What it Means to be Alive" (Dutton, 2022)
Description: Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a pers...