Biochemist, geneticist, cell biologist, and Nobel Prize–winner can’t define life

That’s fair, since no one can, objectively, but Paul Nurse doesn’t come close

This is a very smart and so to see polite and friendly professor talking in his field of expertise. He is not a Nobel Prize–winner in chemistry who talks about the purpose of life, or so. In the above clip, he shares some thoughts about life, about which he just wrote a book—his first book.

Yet, he entirely kills the inquiry. He describes cells with genetic material and defines them as the prototypes of life. That’s it? That’s not the way!

Rather, you look at what candidates there are for being called alive, and after that, you try to set criteria for what is still alive and what isn’t.

Then you will find that the line between life and lifeless is very blurred. You’ll see that what to include is more a matter of taste than of one or several clear, distinguishing principles!

A. Cells. What in them is alive? Nothing. All cell components are dead chemicals. Although some want us to think that DNA molecules behave as if they want something (to multiply). Still, if the cell is not alive, what is?

Just like a house made of stones. None of the stones has shelter capacity, but when piled up, together they may. Reductionists, insisting on believing that any system is nothing but the sum of its parts, can’t admit this.

B. A virus, is it alive? The answer is arbitrary, dependent on how you define life, not on facts. A virus is genetic material in a wrapper. The genetic material has codes for producing the wrapper and itself. But it can’t copy. Yet, when it inserts itself into a cell that can, it can hijack the cell’s machinery and reproduce. Or better: the cell will reproduce the virus.

Compare: Can soap do dishes? No, it can’t, but a machine or human can use soap to help clean dishes. Does the soap clean or the cleaner?

C. Mitochondria are the powerhouses of advanced animal cells. They resemble a bit chlorophyll inclusions inside plant cells. They have their own genetic molecules. They live in symbiosis with their host cells. It’s easy to perceive they once were externally living cells. It seems unfair to call these mitochondria not alive. If cells are alive, so are mitochondria.

Their distinguished role in cells could explain the eagerness of our cells to uptake more microorganisms to see if they could be of great use too. Unfortunately, all those guests now turn out malicious and dangerous.

Other cell inclusions are not enclosed spaces holding their DNA or RNA. It could be that some of them too once were outside organisms that found their place inside cells but are not closed off with their own genes, and I see no reason to call them alive. They’re part of the living cell.

D. Red blood cells. They have produced so much hemoglobin that they’re stuffed with it. They even kicked out their nuclei with the genetic material. These cells cannot regenerate and are on their way to death. They can stay functioning for another 100 days. I wouldn’t call them alive. Maximally, maybe, dying. They remind me of skin cells. They divide and send the top layer to the outside to be washed off, also on their way out.

Red blood and skin cells cannot maintain and restore their homeostasis. They are like plucked flowers, once alive and now increasingly withering.

Alive, I would call bone cells but not the deposits by them. But I would not call the bones with life cells alive although they are stronger with life cells among them than without. The bone cells may lay dormant for a long time, but when their bone needs rebuilding, they start multiplying.

Many neurons don’t multiply, but I’d call them alive because they maintain or restore their homeostasis continually and interact with neighbor cells. And they could grow and divide when moved to a petri dish.

However, some machines could regenerate, but I wouldn’t call them alive.

E. More difficult is the prion, pronounced “pree-on.” That’s just a protein. Some of them are benign, but some of them are super malicious. The latter can ‘infect’ other prion molecules, turning them malicious too. So, they seem to reproduce. Are they alive then? Just a string of amino acids?

Frozen water molecules can freeze adjacent water molecules. Doesn’t that make them infectious then?

‘Infectious’ prions can ‘multiply’ in neurons and fungal cells.

***

Good luck defining Life. It is certainly too easy and sloppy to just call cell life life and be silent about the rest.

Let me try a definition proposal: Something is alive if it is fit to reproduce (cells, bacteria, yeast) or can initiate multiplication inside its living host, aiding (mitochondria), hampering (viruses), or killing (prions) it.

This excludes red blood and surface skin cells and intra-cellular frozen water molecules, the latter because the freezing is initiated from outside.

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