Arnold De Loof 0101
Question: Could you explain what Life is?
De Loof: I am a professor in biology, and at a certain moment in my career I got very frustrated because I could not tell the students the answer to the most basic question of all biology, namely: What is life?
So then I thought: What I am doing here? If a student asks me “What is life?”, and I have to say “I don’t know”, a clever student should say: “Bye, Bye, I am not going to study biology."
So then I started to analyse why it is so extremely difficult to define life. We are alive ourselves, we see life in many different forms all around us, but nevertheless we are unable to say: This is Life! So I started to read quite a number of books and these where mainly written by chemists interested in the molecules that were responsible for the coming into existence of the first forms of life. Some were written by mathematicians, quite abstract but that is not what we need to say in biology.
So, at a given moment, I said to myself: "Let’s forget all that has been written and be very realistic and ask very simple questions". So my first question was then: Is it OK if we compare life, or the living state, on the one hand, with dead, or non-living matter, on the other? But that turned out not to be the right question.
The right question should be: "What is the difference between being alive, at one moment, and being dead the next: what has changed? During the transition from still alive to no longer alive, what has changed? In other words: "What is the definition of Death"? If you look in textbooks of biology you find no answer to that. There is no definition of death, and most text books of biology give no clear definition of what life is, either. But what is Death, and what changes at the moment of that transition?
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