Nick Lane (born 1967) is a British biochemist and writer. He is a professor in evolutionary biochemistry at University College London. His books have won several awards.

Career

Educated at Imperial College, London, he earned his PhD at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School in 1995 with a thesis entitled In vivo studies of ischaemia-reperfusion injury in hypothermically stored rabbit renal autograft. He then worked as Medical Writer at Oxford Clinical Communications for a year before joining the medical multimedia company Medi Cine International as a writer. In 1999 he became strategic director at what was, by then, Adelphi Medi Cine, a post he held until 2002.

He became an Honorary Researcher at University College London in 1997, has held the post of Honorary Reader since 2006 and was the first Provost's Venture Research Fellow there from 2009 to 2012. Since October 2013 he has been Reader in Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at UCL. He is the author of popular science books and many articles on the origin of life, hydrothermal vents, evolution, and cellular biology, among topics. He is the winner of the 2015 Biochemical Society Award and the 2016 Michael Faraday Prize.

Publications

His book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, won the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. He appeared on In Our Time on Radio Four on 13 September 2012, when the topic of discussion was the cell, and again on 15 May 2014, when the topic was photosynthesis.

Books

  • Lane, Nick (2002). Oxygen: The molecule that made the world. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0198508038.
  • ——— Fuller, Barry; Benson, Erica, eds. (2004). Life in the Frozen State. CRC Press. ISBN978-0415247009.
  • ——— (2005). Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0192804815.
  • ——— (2009). . Profile Books. ISBN978-1861978486.
  • ——— (2015). The Vital Question: Why Is Life The Way It Is?. Profile Books. ISBN978-1781250365.
  • ——— (2022). Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN978-0-393-65148-5.

Selected articles

  • Lane, Nick (29 March 2006). . Nature. 440 (7084): 600–2. Bibcode:. doi:. PMID. S2CID.
  • ——— (25 October 2006). . Nature. 443 (7114): 901–903. Bibcode:. doi:. PMID. S2CID.
  • ——— (19 November 2009). "Biodiversity: On the origin of bar codes". Nature. 462 (7271): 272–274. doi:. PMID.
  • ——— (7 August 2010). "Genesis Revisited'". New Scientist.
  • ——— (25 June 2012). . New Scientist.

External links