Funny old thing, life.

I ran into Steven A Christie, MD, JD online. He wrote a pro-forced-birth book called Speaking for the Unborn, which purports to provide 30 second pro-life rebuttals to pro-choice arguments. I think 30 seconds actually refers to the amount of tiime he spent thinking about them. It's a truly bad book. But he sent me a copy.

And to give it credit, I don't think any other book has made my job drop to the floor from the very first sentence.

Whether or not something’s alive is a purely scientific question that science has fully settled

As I wrote to him, there aren't enough LOLs in the entire universe to cover that one. Just google the phrase Are viruses alive?. Not a bad idea anyway... you can come up with some interesting, informative discussions. I like this one. Funny, the Microbiology Society hosting a discussion about a fully-settled question!

Science in general is not a safe space for binary minds, and biology is the most unsafe space of all. You can make reasonably good arguments a virus like SARS-CoV2 is not alive. But then you find out about the giant viruses, some of which have bigger genomes than some bacteria. And you realize there are mycoplasmas, and Rickettsiae, a continuum all the way up to free-living bacteria.

It's alive! Alive, I tell you!

And on the other end of the size scale, there are entities like the trinucleotide CAG repeat that causes Huntingdon's disease. Is it alive? Well, it reprduces along with the rest of the host genome, the tracts of CAG actually getting longer with successive generations, which is something of a mercy, because it eventually kills the host so quickly they don't pass on the mutant gene. Horrible disease; it killed one of my professors in graduate school. It would be a real stretch to call this thing of molecular mass 1800 g/mol alive. But if you're going to write a nice tight definition of life, better make sure it's excluded. Why you would waste your time on such a quixotic enterprise as trying to define life is a better question.

The point is, it doesn't matter. It has no practiccal significance. Scientists long ago abandoned Plationic questions such as whether something is alive. Christie would have been on firmer ground saying this is not a question scientists debate much any more. Well, we do, but not in conference sessions, we argue about it in the bar at the end of the day's session. It's applying a bright line to a continuum. Always good fun; such problems usually are. But nobody ever told my colleague Jim Van Etten he couldn't, as a biologist, study giant viruses, because they're not alive.