I naively thought that we could have a molecular definition for life, come up with a set of genes that would minimally define life. Nature just refuses to be so easily quantified.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Whatever life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world.
I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.
You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.
You can't have life without the genetic code.
The manner in which life constructs itself must be dealing with some other principle which we've failed to identify.
Life must be considered sui generis; it is not a form of energy, nor can it be expressed in terms of something else.
Life is a process of evolution.
Life, in my estimation, is a biological misadventure that we terminate on the shoulders of six strange men whose only objective is to make a hole in one with you.
Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life - plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support.
Life is a DNA software system.