Sherrie L. Lyons, From Cells to Organisms

In 1970, the French biologist Francois Jacob opened his famous book, The Logic of Life, with an erudite epigraph: ‘Do you see this egg? With it you can overthrow all the schools of theology, all the churches of the earth.’1 The epigraph was taken from Diderot’s posthumously published dialogue D’Alembert’s Dream and compellingly conveyed the wonder and puzzlements attached to such a small biological entity. Yet, Jacob’s epigraph left out Diderot’s most interesting questions, which immediately followed: ‘What is this egg? ... How does this mass evolve into a new organization, into sensitivity, into life?’2 Today, we might easily turn Diderot’s questions into more straightforward jargons without reducing their inspiring content; namely, what is a cell? How did it change our ways of understanding life phenomena? And how do cells proliferate to make embryos, tissues, organs, whole functional organisms and feeling beings? Sherrie Lyons’s book looks at

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