One of the most celebrated science writers of our time, Carl Zimmer, asks: What is life? Scientists can't agree on an answer. The question hangs over some of society's most charged conflicts-is a fertilized egg a living person? When is a person legally dead? Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama, searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, or examining the coronavirus that has turned our world upside down. Zimmer offers astounding, beautiful portraits of life at its most bizarre. He follows the epic struggle scientists have had to define life, from eighteenth-century naturally baffled by animals living for years in suspended animation to twenty-first-century rosearchers trying to build life from scratch. Book jacket.