kuniga.me > Books > The Machinery of Life

The Machinery of Life

The Machinery of Life by David S. Goodsell. This is a short book and contains lots of beautiful and detailed illustrations of parts of the cell. I had only been exposed to abstract depictions in school so it was wonderful to see a more realistic depiction.

Random things learned:

• We need Vitamin A to see because the proteins (the building blocks of our body) we produce are colorless and cannot absorb light.
• HIV virus is hard to vaccinate against because it mutates very fast and it escapes our immune system because it merges with the cell DNA to produce more virus at which point is pretty much undetectable.
• Bacteria have circular DNA - they don't have to worry about the ends of chains DNA wearing out during copying so they don't need telomeres like us.
• The way the cyanide poisons is by hypoxia: cyanide binds with hemoglobin much more strongly than oxygen, which deprives the body of it. Since low-oxygen blood is blueish, it makes the person look blue (cyan), hence the name of the compound.

---

This entry was parsed from an older retrospective post.