Amazon Review

An exerpt of the review in Amazon.com reads:

This little book is a real treat. Among other things, it is a timely rebut of the genome-mania that has dominated biological science and popular attention paid to it over the past decade. This is not to say that Noble's book is an anti-genome book. On the contrary, Noble presents the view of the genome as not more (or less) than another few molecules that make up the complex interacting soup of life.
One of the gems in this book is Noble's description on the combinatorial explosion associated with the seemingly straightforward task of developing gene ontologies--the assignment of biological functions to genes. Noble explains in simple terms why it is practically impossible to enumerate necessarily immense set of high-level functions associated with a specific gene, and why the quest to map functions to genes or genes to functions is a hopeless task unless one adopts a systems view.

Science

The ending of the review in SCIENCE reads:

The Music of Life is a surprisingly, if deceptively, easy read. One learns as much, if not more, on a second reading as on the first. Noble presents his case for the systems approach with elegance and a simplicity that hides unnecessary detail. His conversational style together with personal vignettes give readers the feeling they are with him sharing in an active process of discovery. The book can be recommended to anyone, novice or professional, interested in systems biology and the foundations of life.

The Guardian

In this highly evocative essay, eminent physiologist Noble argues that a dominant metaphor in biology is blocking the path to further understanding. This is the notion that genes are the "program" of life and that they are its fundamental unit. Instead, the author shows, genes are merely a database and cannot do anything without other systems interpreting them, and there is ample evidence for "downward causation", in which higher-level systems and the environment affect the way genes work. Further, genes rely for their effect on chemical, physical and other properties of the natural world, which we all "inherit". (So much, Noble concludes poetically, for the notion of inheritance being solely via genes.)

The book begins with a stirring inversion of Richard Dawkins's famous "selfish gene" metaphor (we are the point of the genes "imprisoned" inside us, he insists, not vice versa) and works through some fascinating examples in Noble's own specialism of cardiology: the heart's rhythm, for example, is not predictable from our genes or even at the molecular level.

Stop thinking about computers: the better metaphor for life, he concludes, is that of polyphonic music.

SCOTSMAN

The science of molecular biology has yielded some remarkable results in the past 50 years or so - from the discovery of DNA to the sequencing of the human genome. In this short but very rich book, Denis Noble, a professor of physiology at Oxford, attempts to do for so-called "systems biology" what Richard Dawkins has done for the field of molecular genetics. Noble's claim is that the molecular approach, which is concerned with describing the constituent parts of organisms, is incapable of answering the fundamental question "What is life?" Living organisms are complex systems and understanding them requires abandoning the deterministic idea that the genome is a programme that "causes" life. 

From readers' reviews on Amazon

It is one of the most important books I have ever read....... It is rare to find a book with so many well founded and important philosophical implications of the scientific discoveries in our time. (Lars Petter Endresen) (13 August 2006)

Finally someone with knowledge and common (scientific) sense! Dr. Noble is one of the most creative physiologists of our time, and not surprisingly he decided to put an end to the endless "DNA craze" affecting scientists and media alike.......... (Damir Janigro) (31 August 2006)

The book is a brain-stretching delight: an impassioned attack on narrow thinking regarding evolution, whether from the general media or other, specialised scientists. (K. P. Harrison) (25 October 2006)