LIFE IS A NETWORK. AND SOMETIMES IT BREAKS Four billion years ago, order emerged from inanimate matter – not from individual molecules, but from threads of interaction that wove themselves into ever more complex networks. This book traces the incredible journey from the first spark of life in the ‘RNA world’ to the intricate genomic regulatory networks that still govern every human cell today. But where there is a network, there is also vulnerability. When a key node cracks, rare diseases arise – not as random genetic errors, but as breakdowns in the very fabric of life. The authors transform this idea into a bold hypothesis and a new classification system that gives these enigmatic diseases something that medicine has long denied them: logic, meaning and hope. For researchers, clinicians, lecturers and students of genetics, medicine, biology, biophysics and bioinformatics.