This book describes half a century of progress in two mainstream areas of biological research: membrane transport, initially a focus of physiologists, and oxidative phosphorylation, initially a focus of biochemists. Robinson shows how the development of new explanatory models had unexpectedly merged these inquiries into a new field, bioenergetics. In the late 1930s, explanations for the asymmetric distribution of ions between cells and their environments invoked absolute impermeabilities of the cell's surrounding membranes. But new experiments contradicted that idea and demonstrated that forming the transmembrane distributions required metabolic energy, implying the participation of active transport "pumps." Subsequent studies identified, isolated, and characterized these pumps as enzymes coupling ionic transport to the consumption of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), an "energy-rich" molecule serving as a cellular energy store. In the late 1930s oxidative phosphylation, the process of coupling ATP synthesis to oxidative metabolism, was identified. The explanatory model emerging in the next decades, however, did not follow the enzymatic precedents of known metabolic phosphorylations but rather embodied the principle that metabolic oxidations drive active transport pumps to create transmembrane distribution of ions, with these ionic asymmetries then driving ATP synthesis. It was discovered that ATP consumption can form ionic asymmetries; ionic asymmetries can drive ATP formation; and ionic asymmetries-like ATP-can also power other cellular functions.
Dr. Robinson received his undergraduate and medical training at Duke, Yale, and Stanford Universities. He next pursued biomedical research at Yale, the State University of New York, Cambridge University and the National Institutes of Health: actively studying the biochemistry of metabolic processes, the pharmacology of synaptic transmission, and the biophysics of transport enzymes. After several decades of laboratory investigations, he returned to early interests in the philosophy and history of science. In addition to a number of papers in these fields, he has written two "scholarly" books: Moving Questions: A History of Membrane Transport and Bioenergetics (Oxford Univ. Press, 1997) and Mechanisms of Synaptic Transmission: Bridging the Gaps, 1890 1990 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). The latter was awarded the Outstanding Book Award by the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences.
Most recently, Dr. Robinson has published, for a broader audience, God's Place in the Universe: This book notes that humans commonly seek supernatural explanations, assured by faith in divine revelation. Thus, the Bible describes an omniscient omnipotent God who created all about us - including human beings crafted in His own image. The Bible also emphasizes notions of sin, purpose, and immortal souls.
Alternative approaches, grounded in observation and experiment, propose natural mechanisms and materials: generating accurate, concise, comprehensive, and fruitful formulations. These scientific views sharply contradict Biblical accounts in concept and detail, noting the Sun's birth billions of years ago, an ordinary star among ordinary galaxies, its capture of debris to form our Solar System, origins of Earthly life through spontaneous chemical interactions that formed self replicating systems, and evolution by Darwinian natural selection of all earthly inhabitants, including Homo sapiens. Notably absent is evidence for souls or cosmic intent.
