The Cell: A Very Short Introduction Edition: 1

In this Very Short Introduction, Terrence Allen and Graham Cowling describe the nature of cells - their basic structure, their varying forms, their division, their differentiation, their signalling, and programmed death. Cells are the basic constituent of life, and understanding cells and how they work is central to all biology and medicine. Abstract: In this Very Short Introduction, Terence Allen and Graham Cowling describe the nature of cells - their basic structure, their varying forms, their division, their differentiation, their signalling, and programmed death. Cells are the basic constituent of life, and understanding cells and how they work is central to all biology and medicine.   Read more... In this Very Short Introduction , Terrence Allen and Graham Cowling offer an illuminating account of the nature of cells--their basic structure, forms, division, signaling, and programmed death. Allen and Cowling start with the simple "prokaryotic" cell--cells with [...]no nucleus--and show how the bodies of more complex plants and animals consist of billions of "eukaryotic" cells, of varying kinds, adapted to fill different roles--red blood cells, muscle cells, branched neurons. The authors also show that each cell is an astonishingly complex chemical factory, the activities of which we have only begun to unravel in the past fifty years.