Roger Highfield

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz

'Quite simply the best book about science and life that I have ever read' - Alice Roberts How does life begin? What drives a newly fertilized egg to keep dividing and growing until it becomes 40 trillion cells, a greater number than stars in the galaxy? How do these cells know how to make a human, from lips to heart to toes? How does your body build itself? Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz was pregnant at 42 when a routine genetic test came back with that dreaded word: abnormal. A quarter of sampled cells contained abnormalities and she was warned her baby had an increased risk of being miscarried or born with birth defects. Six months later she gave birth to a healthy baby boy and her research on mice embryos went on to prove that – as she had suspected – the embryo has an amazing and previously unknown ability to correct abnormal cells at an early stage of its development. The Dance of Life will take you inside the incredible world of life just as it begins and reveal the wonder of the earliest and most profound moments in how we become human. Through Magda’s trailblazing research as a professor at Cambridge – where she has doubled the survival time of human embryos in the laboratory, and made the first artificial embryo-like structures from stem cells – you’ll discover how early life is programmed to repair and organise itself, what this means for the future of pregnancy, and how we might one day solve IVF disorders, prevent miscarriages and learn more about the dance of life as it starts to take shape. The Dance of Life is a moving celebration of the balletic beauty of life’s beginnings.

Symmetry, Cells and How We Become Human

The Dance of Life

The New Science of How a Single Cell Becomes a Human Being

Dance of Life

A renowned biologist's cutting-edge and unconventional examination of human reproduction and embryo research Scientists have long struggled to make pregnancy easier, safer, and more successful. In The Dance of Life, developmental and stem-cell biologist Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz takes us to the front lines of efforts to understand the creation of a human life. She has spent two decades unraveling the mysteries of development, as a simple fertilized egg becomes a complex human being of forty trillion cells. Zernicka-Goetz's work is both incredibly practical and astonishingly vast: her groundbreaking experiments with mouse, human, and artificial embryo models give hope to how more women can sustain viable pregnancies. Set at the intersection of science's greatest powers and humanity's greatest concern, The Dance of Life is a revelatory account of the future of fertility -- and life itself.

Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz

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