Vital Dust ─ Life As a Cosmic Imperative

Is the emergence of life on Earth the result of a single chance event or combination of lucky accidents, or is it the outcome of biochemical forces woven into the fabric of the universe? And if inevitable, what are these forces, and how do they account not only for the origin of life but also for its evolution toward increasing complexity? Vital Dust is a groundbreaking history of life on Earth, a history that only someone of Chrisitian de Duve’s stature and erudition could have written.

Christian De Duve shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for Biology or Medicine with Albert Claude and George Palade for their discoveries concerning the structural and functional organization of the cell. he is Professor Emeritus at the Medical Faculty of the University of Louvain, Belgium, and Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus at the Rockefeller University in New York. He is also the author of A Guided Tour of the Living Cell and Blueprint for a Cell.