The Genesis Quest by Michael Marshall
The Genesis Quest is my first book. It tells the story of the century-long scientific effort to understand how life began on Earth.
What happened over 3.5 billion years ago to turn a dead ball of wet volcanic rock into a thriving biosphere? What did the first living thing look like, what was it made of, and how did it form?
Beginning in the 1920s in Soviet Russia, a small band of scientists has tried to figure out what happened. But from the 1960s onwards they have been riven by doubt and furious argument, because life is so complicated that it has proved incredibly difficult to imagine how it could have got started. It's only now, almost 100 years after the first serious hypothesis was put forward, that we're starting to see a way past this impasse.
The story is both a scientific puzzle and a human story about ingenuity, rivalry, and staggering levels of bloody-mindedness. It has explosions, totalitarian governments, voyages to the bottom of the sea and bizarre life forms.
The book is being published in August 2020. The UK publishers are Weidenfeld & Nicolson (part of the Orion Publishing Group) and the US publishers are the University of Chicago Press. My agent is Peter Tallack of Science Factory.
What happened over 3.5 billion years ago to turn a dead ball of wet volcanic rock into a thriving biosphere? What did the first living thing look like, what was it made of, and how did it form?
Beginning in the 1920s in Soviet Russia, a small band of scientists has tried to figure out what happened. But from the 1960s onwards they have been riven by doubt and furious argument, because life is so complicated that it has proved incredibly difficult to imagine how it could have got started. It's only now, almost 100 years after the first serious hypothesis was put forward, that we're starting to see a way past this impasse.
The story is both a scientific puzzle and a human story about ingenuity, rivalry, and staggering levels of bloody-mindedness. It has explosions, totalitarian governments, voyages to the bottom of the sea and bizarre life forms.
The book is being published in August 2020. The UK publishers are Weidenfeld & Nicolson (part of the Orion Publishing Group) and the US publishers are the University of Chicago Press. My agent is Peter Tallack of Science Factory.
