Welcome to the Nuddle Better Show, Smithsonian Associates Inside Science interview series on radio and podcast, I'm Paul Volgelsing, and as part of our Inside Science interview series with Smithsonian Associates, our guest today is author and scientist, Nick Lane.

Nick Lane will be appearing at the Smithsonian Associates program coming up. You can check out our show notes today for more details.

Generations of students have learned how the Krebs cycle generates the building blocks of life and fuels the furnace of respiration.

I remember it from high school too, but our guest today biochemist Nick Lane is going to explain more.

He is at the vanguard of researchers who ask how this complex Krebs cycle, which offers a contradictory pathway perhaps,

but discusses with us how creation, destruction, and the renewal within ourselves could help us understand questions from the origins of life to the devastation of cancer.

In an animated conversation with us today, Nick Lane guides an exploration through the conflicted merry-go-round of energy and matter that is the Krebs cycle.

Along the way, Nick Lane will recount the scientific detective work that discovered this process while deconstructing textbook views about metabolism.

There's a fascinating conversation when that you won't want to miss because Professor Lane will tell us about how he traces the primacy of the Krebs cycle and its reverse from deep-sea hydrothermal vents and the Cambrian explosion to the individual yet universal experience of aging.

This will be of real interest to our not-old better show audience here at the Smithsonian Associates.

Nick Lane, by distilling and humanizing complex research, will offer an essential overview for anyone,

fascinated by biologies, great mysteries, so many of us here on the show have expressed interest in biology and science these days.

So join us, please, to hear from Nick Lane about what it means to our lives, our death, disease, and the origin of life, yes, the Krebs cycle.

I'll let Nick Lane tell you himself, but first let's hear Nick Lane read a passage from his new book, Transformer.

If there is a view from modern biology, it is that genetic information structures the flow of energy and materials.

To a first approximation, biology is understood in terms of information networks and control systems.

Even the laws of thermodynamics, which govern the behavior of molecules and their interactions and reactions, can be recast in terms of information,

Shannon entropy, the laws of bits of information.

But this view generates its own paradox at the origin of life. Where does all this information come from?

Within the realm of biology, we already have a simple explanation, natural selection, sifts through random differences,

favoring what works, eliminating what doesn't generation after generation. Information accumulates with function over time.

We can quibble over details, but there is no conceptual difficulty here.

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