From the primordial soup to meteorite impact zones, the Manhattan Project to the latest research, this book is the first full history of the scientists who strive to explain the genesis of life.

How did life begin? Why are we here? These are some of the most profound questions we can ask.
 
For almost a century, a small band of eccentric scientists has struggled to answer these questions and explain one of the greatest mysteries of all: how and why life began on Earth. There are many different proposals, and each idea has attracted passionate believers who promote it with an almost religious fervor, as well as detractors who reject it with equal passion.
 
But the quest to unravel life’s genesis is not just a story of big ideas. It is also a compelling human story, rich in personalities, conflicts, and surprising twists and turns. Along the way, the journey takes in some of the greatest discoveries in modern biology, from evolution and cells to DNA and life’s family tree. It is also a search whose end may finally be in sight.
 
In The Genesis Quest, Michael Marshall shows how the quest to understand life’s beginning is also a journey to discover the true nature of life, and by extension our place in the universe.

The reredos of the fifteenth-century chapel of All Souls College Oxford, with its combination of medieval niches and statuary by George Gilbert Scott, has remained one of the unsung glories of both medieval perpendicular architecture and Victorian restoration. Informed by recent scientific investigation of its stonework and its surviving medieval polychromy, this volume follows the reredos from the phases of its medieval and early Tudor construction, through its covering up with a succession of baroque and neoclassical decorative schemes, to its uncovering and restoration in the 1870s. Through a sweeping survey of the chapel’s architectural and decorative history, this book provides a novel and revealing vantage point on the artistic, cultural, and ecclesiological history of Britain across four centuries.