Perspective: A Perpetual Quest To Study Life
- Diego Ramírez Martín del Campo
- 10 minutes ago
- 7 min read
In the very first class of my first day in college as a biology major, the teacher asked us a simple question: “What is life?”
We all knew why we wanted to study it, but the question seemed trivial.
“Life is that which is born, grows, reproduces, and dies.”
That was our consensus as a class. And, with that, we fell right into her trap as she quickly refuted our answer.
“Fire isn’t alive, yet it grows by consuming organic matter; the line between birth and death gets blurry considering some organisms can clone themselves; and nonliving agents, such as viruses — since they cannot survive on their own — are subject to natural selection.”
As my teacher explained, there is no universal definition of life. Each field uses its own working definition.
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Many thinkers have tried to answer the question. In Histoire Naturelle, 18th-century French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, described life as a property of organized matter and organic molecules. In 1802, French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck presented a theory that considered life as gelatinous, organized matter with the capacity for transformation. For the famous 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin, life was an irreversible, unrepeatable, and ever-transforming process.
With the turn of the century came a push from modern disciplines such as synthetic biology and astrobiology to develop a unified definition of life. However, the reality is that a definition that works for one field finds exceptions in another. For example, contemporary American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis thought that life is “an intricate pattern of growth and death, dispatch and entrenchment, transformation and decay” that exists through symbiotic collaboration. For Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, “life is sustained by a self-reproducing, aperiodic crystal that fights entropy.” That crystal was later identified as DNA. And a popular working definition from a NASA panel states: “life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.”
Mentioning Darwinian evolution excludes natural phenomena such as fire, and its emphasis on self-sustaining beings avoids ambiguous cases such as viruses, since they cannot sustain themselves and require a host. However, how strict should we be, as parasitic animals and plants fully rely on a host too, and many fields support non-Darwinian evolution methods. In the case of synthetic life development, researchers tend to look for characteristics, such as metabolism and homeostasis, that living beings share. Then again, intracellular parasites and fully dormant bacteria or pollen don’t meet these requirements.
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As a young college student, the idea that biologists — a group that studies life — couldn’t define what life is, greatly disappointed me. At the time, I felt like I was studying a subject that lacked clarity. So, I tried to push that thought to the back of my mind to focus on my academics.
This lack of definition bothered me, but luckily, it didn’t ruin biology for me. No matter how underwhelmed I felt, nothing could have stopped the excitement I felt the first time I saw a dinoflagellate swirling in muddy water under a microscope; a pack of orcas approaching my research boat at full speed; or a zoo lion, just a few inches from me and roaring at my teacher because he got too comfortable approaching it. Working definition or not, there was no denying that what was in front of me was clearly alive. Although something seemed to be missing, there were many other things that were fascinating. Here, the words of Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in their book What is Life? made all the sense in the world:
Life is existence’s celebration. Life is planetary exuberance, a solar phenomenon…. Life as God and music and carbon and energy is a whirling nexus of growing, fusing, and dying beings. It is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction.
As a curious consumer of science essays and videos, I enjoyed how cleverly and personally some science subjects could be approached. Also, I realized how science was encapsulated in its own trenches. While working on my dissertation, I began enrolling in science communication workshops to pursue it as a profession.
The path ahead was uncertain, but I felt excited to see what the future would hold. And then, the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and the world shut down.
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2020 was the year when, ironically, a group of nonliving organisms forced us to stay cooped up at home. To someone about to graduate from college and with no job experience, it meant moving back home with my parents. The pandemic was terrifying and disorienting; the future felt uncertain.
It took a year for things to begin settling down and for everyone to try to return to normal. Streets slowly filled up, businesses reopened, friends and family members got new jobs, went to graduate schools, got married — but I struggled to move on.
Hoping to get published and get paid, I threw myself into freelance writing without knowing much about the craft. Parallelly, I was finishing my thesis, which I would have to defend to earn my biology degree, and also applying for master’s programs. In the end, I stretched myself too thin. Opportunities to write about science here in Mexico are almost nil, and terribly underpaid if at all. As a newcomer, the best I could hope for was unpaid gigs for small local media outlets. Fortunately, I was able to defend my thesis. However, a rejection due to a disastrous interview for my master's studies in Philosophy of Sciences with a specialization in science communication (the closest I could find here to a master’s degree in science communication) at my alma mater landed me in a really dark place.
Not knowing what to do with my life, not living the life I wanted to live, and not fulfilling my own expectations — of being a successful researcher as I had imagined as a child, or a science communicator as I had planned as an adult — made me feel like an impostor in someone else’s shoes.
And then, the question came back. What is life? The same three words as before, but with a scope that surpassed life on Earth and encompassed my sense of identity. Earlier, I couldn’t understand what made certain things alive and not others. But now, begrudgingly, I couldn’t understand why others lived their lives while I couldn’t. It was an irony — I was a person who studied life, but didn’t know what it was or what it was about. I wanted life to change, but I didn’t have it in me to steer it. So I just let the massless weight in my chest anchor me in time, as I lost interest in life, mine or otherwise.
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Biologist was one of the first words I ever learned to say in English — Spanish being my mother tongue — when I was around four years old. I wanted to become one when I grew up. And when I became one, I doubted my decision.
I remembered what a professor once told us. “We may not be able to define what life is, but we can start by identifying what it isn’t.”
Some molecules and chemicals exist as byproducts of living beings, but they are not alive. Cells and nerves are certainly alive, but they don’t live. As for myself, I was alive, but felt detached from my life. I wanted time to stop, but everything kept moving — and I resented it as if I’d been betrayed by every living being and the mere concept of life. I couldn’t find the life in me; yet it went on around me. A green shoot poked through the concrete, moss shaded a wall green, and a crafty crow dropped nuts at a spotlight for cars to crush.
I was searching for life while missing it entirely. As the question resurfaced from the depths of my mind, I thought, “To study life, do we need to know exactly what it is?”
The contemporary philosopher of science Edouard Machery argues that there are two ways to define life. The first one is the folk concept, i.e., a definition based on individual experiences and intuitive judgment about what seems alive to us. Using my previous example, I would argue that orcas and lions are alive because their reactions appear similar to those of humans. However, this definition is subjective and ambiguous. Because people have different experiences and intuitions, a universal definition cannot be produced. The second one is the scientific concept, which defines life through an objective, scientific understanding. As mentioned before, different biology fields will craft specific definitions that cater to their own disciplines. As a result, Machery argues that looking for a definition of life is ultimately pointless and that we should stop worrying about finding one.
The same, I realized, could be said about everyday life. By living according to what I wasn’t and what I should have been, I had lost myself in the details. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not in favor of abandoning the search for definitions; it’s just that a definition should not always be the end goal.
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My professors weren’t ignoring the question; they simply didn’t need an answer. Some disciplines of biology do need definitions if they want to create or find new forms of life. But the concept of life can’t be pigeonholed into one single thing, because one can’t reduce an entire process into a single event. Or, as Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan beautifully put it: life is a verb, not a noun.
Regarding my future, I’m still unsure what to expect, but I now see it as a process. There is clarity in my understanding. I see life in the early bacteria that found better chances of survival by merging into one. I see it in the cocoon that welcomes change and the axolotl that resists it. Life is my newborn nephew; life is a condition, an improbability, and is best understood when left to happen.
After all, “Life finds a way”. That is part of its legacy, and I think it is a beautiful burden to bear.
