The Big Questions -- Life

There are over 100 definitions for 'life' and all are wrong
It is surprisingly difficult to pin down the difference between living and non-living things

By Josh Gabbatiss

2 January 2017
Most of us probably do not need to think too hard to distinguish living things from the "non-living".
A human is alive; a rock is not. Easy!
Scientists and philosophers do not see things quite this clearly. They have spent millennia pondering
what it is that makes something alive. Great minds from Aristotle to Carl Sagan have given it some
thought and they still have not come up with a definition that pleases everyone. In a very literal
sense, we do not yet have a "meaning" for life.
If anything, the problem of defining life has become even more difficult over the last 100 years or so.
Until the 19th Century one prevalent idea was that life is special thanks to the presence of an
intangible soul or "vital spark". This idea has now fallen out of favour in scientific circles. It has
since been superseded by more scientific approaches. Nasa, for instance, has described life as "a selfsustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution".
But Nasa's is just one of many attempts to pin down all life with a simple description. In fact, over
100 definitions of life have been proposed, with most focusing on a handful of key attributes such as
replication and metabolism.
To make matters worse, different kinds of scientist have different ideas about what is truly necessary
to define something as alive. While a chemist might say life boils down to certain molecules, a
physicist might want to discuss thermodynamics.
For a better idea of why life is so difficult to define, let's meet some of the scientists who are working
on the frontier that separates living things from everything else.

Illustration of Epstein-Barr viruses (Credit: Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library)

Virologists: exploring the grey area at the edge of life as we know it
Did you meet MRS GREN at school? This handy mnemonic is a way for children to remember the
seven processes that supposedly define life: movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction,
excretion and nutrition.
Over 100 definitions of life have been proposed
While this is a useful starting point for defining life, it is not definitive. There are plenty of things we
would not traditionally class as living that can tick these boxes. Some crystals, infectious proteins
called prions, and even certain computer programmes are "living" according to MRS GREN.
The classic borderline case is viruses. "They are not cells, they have no metabolism, and they are
inert as long as they do not encounter a cell, so many people (including many scientists) conclude
that viruses are not living," says Patrick Forterre, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris,
France.
For his part, Forterre thinks viruses are alive, but he acknowledges that the decision really depends
on where you decide to place the cut-off point.

Prion proteins almost count as "life" (Credit: Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library)
While viruses lack virtually everything that we might think is required for membership of the life
club, they do possess information coded in DNA or RNA. This blueprint for life, shared with every
living thing on the planet, means viruses can evolve and replicate albeit only by hijacking the
machinery of living cells.
The very fact that viruses like all life as we know it carry DNA or RNA has led some to suggest
that viruses must belong in our tree of life. Others have even claimed that viruses hold clues to
understanding how life began in the first place. If this is the case, life begins to look less like a blackand-white entity and more like a nebulous quantity with confusing not-quite-alive, not-quite-dead
borders.
Some scientists have embraced this idea. They characterise viruses as existing "at the border between
chemistry and life". And this raises an interesting question: when does chemistry become more than
the sum of its parts?

Harold Urey studied life's origins (Credit: US Department of Energy/Science Photo Library)
Chemists: exploring the recipe of life
"Life as we know it is based on carbon-based polymers," says Jeffrey Bada from the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. From these polymers namely nucleic acids
(the building blocks of DNA), proteins and polysaccharides virtually the entire diversity of life is
built.
Bada was a student of Stanley Miller, one half of the duo behind the Miller-Urey experiment in the
1950s one of the first experiments to explore the idea that life arose from non-living chemicals. He
has since returned to that famous experiment, demonstrating that an even greater range of
biologically relevant molecules are formed when electricity is shot through a mix of chemicals
thought to have existed on primordial Earth.
Life as we know it may require DNA or RNA, but what about life as we do not know it?
But these chemicals are not alive. It is only when they start doing certain interesting things like
excreting and killing each other that we accord them that honour. So what is needed for chemicals to
make the leap and spring to life? Bada's answer is surprising.
"Imperfect replication of informational molecules would have marked the origin of both life and
evolution, and thus the transition from non-living chemistry to biochemistry," says Bada. The
beginning of replication, and specifically replication that involves errors, leads to the creation of
"offspring" with different levels of ability. These molecular offspring can then compete with each
other for survival.

"This is basically Darwinian evolution on the molecular scale," says Bada.

For many chemists, then, it is replication the process that viruses can undertake only with a helping
hand from biological cells that really helps define life. The fact that informational molecules
DNA and RNA enable replication suggests they are an essential feature of life too.
But characterising life by those specific chemicals fails to take in the bigger picture. Life as we know
it may require DNA or RNA, but what about life as we do not know it?

Would we notice life on Mars? (Credit: Universal Images Group North America LLC/Alamy)
Astrobiologists: hunting for weird aliens
Second-guessing the nature of alien life is a tricky business. Many researchers, including Charles
Cockell and his colleagues at the UK Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh, use
microorganisms capable of surviving in extreme environments as proxies for extra-terrestrial life.
They reason that life elsewhere may inhabit very different conditions, but probably still maintains the
key characteristics of life as we would recognise it on Earth.
Sagan referred to a carbon-centric view of alien life as "carbon chauvinism"
"[But] we must keep an open mind to the possibility of finding something that falls outside of that
definition," says Cockell.
Even attempts to use our knowledge of terrestrial life to try and spot aliens can throw up confusing
results. Nasa, for instance, thought they had a good working definition of life in 1976 when the

Viking 1 spacecraft made a successful landing on Mars, equipped with three tests for life. One test in
particular seemed to show that there was life on Mars: carbon dioxide levels in the Martian soil were
high, suggesting there were microbes living and breathing on the surface of the Red Planet.
In fact, the carbon dioxide the observers saw being released is now almost universally ascribed to the
far less exciting phenomena of non-biological oxidative chemical reactions.

Could life evolve that was based on silicon? (Credit: Jeff J. Daly/Alamy)
Astrobiologists are learning from these experiences and narrowing down the criteria they use to
search for aliens but for now, that search remains unsuccessful.
The creation of artificial life is now a fully-fledged branch of science
Perhaps astrobiologists ought not to narrow their search criteria too far, though. Sagan referred to a
carbon-centric view of alien life as "carbon chauvinism", suggesting that such an outlook could hold
back the search for extra-terrestrials.
"People have suggested that aliens could be silicon-based, or based on different solvents [other than
water]," says Cockell. "There have even been discussions about extra-terrestrial intelligent cloud
organisms."
In 2010, the discovery of bacteria with DNA containing arsenic in place of the standard phosphorus
had a lot of astrobiologists excited. While these findings have since been called into question, many
are still hopeful for demonstrations of life that does not follow conventional rules. Meanwhile, some
scientists are working on life forms that are not based on chemistry at all.

Artificial intelligence may be quite unlike "normal" life (Credit: Science Photo Library)
Technologists: building artificial life
Once the preserve of science fiction, the creation of artificial life is now a fully-fledged branch of
science.
It's trying to take a very broad view of what life is
At one level, artificial life can involve biologists creating new organisms in labs by stitching together
parts of two or more existing life forms. But it can also be a little more abstract.
Ever since the 1990s, when Thomas Ray's Tierra computer software appeared to demonstrate the
synthesis and evolution of digital "life forms", researchers have been trying to create computer
programs that truly simulate life. There are even teams that are beginning to explore the creation of
robots with life-like traits.
"The overarching idea is to try and understand the essential properties of all living systems, not just
the living systems that happen to be found on Earth," says artificial life expert Mark Bedau at Reed
College in Portland, Oregon. "It's trying to take a very broad view of what life is, whereas biology
focuses on the actual forms we are familiar with."

Synthetic biologists are building new life piece by piece (Credit: Brian Jackson/Alamy)
That said, many artificial life researchers use what we know about life on Earth to ground their
studies. Bedau says the researchers use what he calls the "PMC model" a program (for example,
DNA), a metabolism, and a container (for example, a cell's wall). "It's important to note that this isn't
a definition of life in general, just a definition of minimal chemical life," he explains.
Maybe the things we think are essential are really just peculiar to life on Earth
For those artificial life researchers working on non-chemical life forms, their task is to create
software or hardware versions of these PMC components.
"Fundamentally, I don't think there is a sharp definition [of life], but we need something to aim for,"
says Steen Rasmussen, who works on creating artificial life at the University of Southern Denmark in
Odense. Teams from around the world have worked on individual components of the PMC model,
making systems that demonstrate one or other aspect of it. So far, however, no one has assembled
them all together into a functioning synthetic life form.
"This is a bottom-up process, building it piece by piece," he explains.
Artificial life research might ultimately work on a broader scale, building life that is completely alien
to our expectations. Such research could help redefine what we understand by life. But the
researchers are not at that stage yet, says Bedau. "They don't have to worry about defining all forms
of life; maybe they'll talk about it over a beer but they don't need to include it in their work," he says.

By themselves, zebras cannot show us what life really is (Credit: Robert Harding/Alamy)
Philosophers: trying to solve the riddle of life
So if even those searching for and building new life are not yet concerned about a universal
definition, should scientists stop worrying about trying to come up with one? Carol Cleland, a
philosopher at the University of Colorado in Boulder, thinks so. At least for the time being.
Man tends to define in terms of the familiar. But the fundamental truths may not be familiar
"If you're trying to generalise about mammals using zebra, what feature are you going to choose?"
she asks. "Certainly not their mammary glands, because only half of them have those. Their stripes
seem the obvious choice, but these are just an accident. They aren't what make zebra mammals."
And it is the same with life. Maybe the things we think are essential are really just peculiar to life on
Earth. After all, everything from bacteria to lions is derived from a single common ancestor, meaning
that on our chart of life in the Universe, we only really have one data point.
In the words of Sagan: "Man tends to define in terms of the familiar. But the fundamental truths may
not be familiar."

Should viruses count as living things? (Credit: Jezper/Alamy)

Until we have discovered and studied alternative life forms, we cannot know if the features we think
are essential to life are actually universal. Creating artificial life might offer a way to explore
alternative life forms, but at least in the short term it is easy to imagine how any life form dreamed up
inside a computer will be influenced by our preconceptions about living systems.
The definition can actually hinder the search for novel life
To properly define life, we might need to find some aliens.
The irony is that attempts to pin down a definition of life before we discover those aliens might
actually make them more difficult to find. What a tragedy it would be if in the 2020s the new Mars
rover trundles straight past a Martian, simply because it does not recognise it as being alive.
"The definition can actually hinder the search for novel life," says Cleland. "We need to get away
from our current concept, so that we are open to discovering life as we don't know it."
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The idea that life began as clay crystals is 50

years old
In 1966, a young chemist suggested a radical new theory for how life might have begun on Earth.
Fifty years on, we ask if there was any truth in his ideas

By Martha Henriques

24 August 2016
This article has been amended since it was first published
A rock is the ultimate example of inanimate, dead matter. After all, it just sits there, and only moves if
it is pushed. But what if some minerals are not as stone-dead as we thought?
Chemist Graham Cairns-Smith has spent his entire scientific career pushing a simple, radical idea:
life did not begin with fiddly organic molecules like DNA, but with simple crystals.
It is now 50 years since Cairns-Smith first put forward his ideas about the origin of life. Some
scientists have ridiculed them; others have, cautiously or wholeheartedly, embraced them. They have
never become mainstream orthodoxy, but they have never quite gone away either. Was there any truth
to Cairns-Smith's daring proposal? Did life really come from crystals?

Dorothy and Graham Cairns-Smith in their home (Credit: Martha Henriques)

In June 2016 I visited Cairns-Smith and his wife Dorothy at their house on the outskirts of Glasgow,
UK. Now 85, he has a rare condition related to Parkinson's disease, which has affected his mobility.
However, his scientific curiosity and his sense of humour remain undimmed.
He was a dour man and he sort of muttered, 'A pity you chose science'
While he will most likely be remembered for his theories on the origin of life, his first passion was
painting.
"We met when he was at Glasgow and he was doing these," says Dorothy, showing me the prolific
collection lining almost every wall in the downstairs of their house. "He was going through an
abstract phase."
Cairns-Smith's success as a painter eventually became too demanding. He was putting on one-man
shows and getting paintings into the Royal Scottish Academy, but decided to quit and focus on
science, which offered a more reliable income with which to support a family.

Cairns-Smith gave up his career in art for one in science (Credit: Martha Henriques)
"There was a man called William Crosbie, who was a very well-known Scottish painter, who was
teaching him [at Glasgow]," Dorothy recalls. "He was a dour man and he sort of muttered, 'A pity
you chose science'."
However, Cairns-Smith does not seem to have any regrets about his decision. Copies of his scientific
books, and the sketches he drew to illustrate them, are spread across his upstairs study. They have just
as much of a presence in the house as his artwork.
As a student at the University of Edinburgh in the 1950s, Cairns-Smith became fascinated by the
problem of how life began.

Stanley Miller: one of the first to study life's origins (Credit: Science Photo Library)
Through his studies of organic chemistry, Cairns-Smith understood that the essential molecules of life
such as DNA and proteins could be delicate and temperamental. So how could complex
molecules like these spring from the soup of simple compounds on the primordial Earth? This puzzle
still occupies scientists today.
To Cairns-Smith, the experiment raised more questions than it answered
In a study published in 1953 the same year that the structure of DNA was discovered a biochemist
called Stanley Miller sent a bolt of electricity through a mixture of gases and liquids thought to have
been present on the early Earth. The spark turned these simple chemicals into some of the most basic
building blocks of life: amino acids, the units that link together to make proteins.
The story hit the headlines. "Science: Semi-creation" was the headline in Time magazine. Miller's
study became a landmark scientific paper.
But to Cairns-Smith, the experiment raised more questions than it answered.

Stanley Miller's experiment made amino acids from simple chemicals (Credit: Mikkel Juul
Jensen/Science Photo Library)
Although Miller had made some of the most essential compounds of life, his experiment did not
explain how they and other building blocks such as nucleotides, which make up DNA first came
together in an ordered way, to form the complex molecules necessary for life.
His aim was to find a system much simpler than modern life
In Miller's experiment, "simpler molecules are more likely to be found and more likely to form than
more complex molecules," says Cairns-Smith. "The idea you'd make a nucleotide is ridiculous. The
more complicated the molecule, the less of it will form."
For Cairns-Smith, this was the real problem. He thought there had to be another stage before our
elaborate system of genetic material took over.
"It was an extremely interesting experiment," says Cairns-Smith. He also describes it as "beautiful".
But it did not satisfy his curiosity.
So he decided to go back to basics.

Graham Cairns-Smith (Credit: Martha Henriques)

Cairns-Smith asked himself two questions: What are the essential properties needed for a living
system, and can those properties be found anywhere other than the forms of life that we know today?
If you look at clay under a microscope, you will find that it is made of tiny crystals
His aim was to find a system much simpler than modern life, but which had some of the crucial
properties of a living system. He found an answer in an unlikely place: clays.
Most of us, if we think about clay at all, probably just remember how bad we were in pottery class at
school. Clay, at first glance, is just a sort of damp, vaguely gritty dirt.
But Cairns-Smith knew there was more to clay than that. In an abstract way, it can be rather life-like.

A chunk of clay (Credit: Trevor Clifford Photography/Science Photo Library)

If you look at clay under a microscope, you will find that it is made of tiny crystals. Within each
crystal, atoms are arranged in a structure that repeats in a tightly-packed, regular pattern.
Crystals' essential characteristics mean they are primed to begin evolving
Each crystal can grow, if it is placed in water laced with the same chemical components. Crystals can
also split apart, with one "mother" crystal giving rise to "daughter" crystals.
Each crystal can even have its own peculiarities, which it can pass on to its daughter crystals much
like living things inherit traits from their parents. And sometimes, when a crystal breaks apart, new
quirks can be introduced, for instance because of the stress of breaking. This is similar to the process
of genetic mutation, which creates new traits in living things.
In other words, Cairns-Smith reasoned, crystals' essential characteristics mean they are primed to
begin evolving.

Crystals of clay (Credit: Graham Cairns-Smith)

When a crystal passes its peculiarities onto its daughters, these unique traits could either help or
hinder the new crystals.
For instance, the daughters may end up more likely to be able to split into two crystals. If the
characteristics of a crystal affect its ability to split apart, then in effect that crystal has an evolutionary
advantage.
In 50 years there have only been a handful of experiments exploring Cairns-Smith's ideas
In a sense, physical flaws or peculiarities in a crystal could be thought of as genetic information. As a
result, Cairns-Smith thought that crystal minerals could be subject to a simple form of evolution by
natural selection. This idea is now called the "crystals-as-genes hypothesis".
At a later stage, Cairns-Smith reasoned, biological molecules like DNA began to associate with the
crystals. This helped the replication process. Eventually, a "genetic takeover" happened: the
biological molecules developed the ability to replicate by themselves, and left the crystals behind.
Cairns-Smith set all this out in a paper published in 1966, half a century ago.
His ideas are elegant, but there is a big problem: they have proved almost impossible to test. In 50
years there have only been a handful of experiments exploring Cairns-Smith's ideas.

Clay comes in many forms (Credit: Chassenet/BSIP/Science Photo Library)

The trouble is that there is no experimental technique for studying minerals at the tiny scales
necessary to examine the processes Cairns-Smith outlined, says Dieter Braun of Ludwig Maximilian
University of Munich in Germany.
I fell in love with the book because it was so unlike a typical scientific monograph
Researchers would have to minutely examine nanoscale crystals, underwater, over a period of days to
monitor how they behave. "That's just technologically very difficult," Braun says.
He says we would need something analogous to genetic sequencing, the method by which researchers
"read" the letters of DNA that make up the human genome. "You know, it took us 40 years to get
sequencing for a molecule like DNA really working fast," says Braun.
Braun adds that geneticists had a powerful motivation to perfect DNA sequencing: it promised new
medical treatments. Studying clay crystals would be equally difficult and expensive, with no practical
benefit.
Even so, at least one element of Cairns-Smith's hypothesis has been put to the test.

Cairns-Smith found early success as an artist (Credit: Martha Henriques)

Bart Kahr is a crystallographer at New York University in the US. He first discovered Cairns-Smith's
ideas when he came across one of his books in a shop in the mid-1980s.
He wanted to track how mother crystals pass on their traits to daughter crystals
"I fell in love with the book because it was so unlike a typical scientific monograph," says Kahr. "It
was so impossibly rich [in] genuinely new ideas, and it was written in a kind of a literary vein,
almost."
The next time Kahr saw the idea mentioned was in the mid-2000s when it was harshly criticised.
"I was astonished that, 25 years on, people would still invoke the crystals-as-genes theory, only to
knock it down by instantly saying that there's not any evidence for it whatsoever," says Kahr. "It was
like a persistent straw man, that everybody felt that they had to acknowledge, but only to then
pejoratively dismiss it as not ever having been tested."
Kahr decided to test it in his lab. He wanted to track how mother crystals pass on their traits to
daughter crystals, to find out whether inheritance might work in clay minerals.

Crystals are never perfectly regular (Credit: AMMRF, University of Sydney/Science Photo Library)
He decided to focus on a set of crystal traits called "screw dislocations". These are columns running
throughout the crystal, where part of it has been nudged slightly out of alignment. Dislocations come
about through the process of crystal growth, and the pattern of dislocations throughout a crystal can
form a unique pattern.
Clays are just lousy crystals
Cairns-Smith had likened these irregularities to the holes in old-fashioned computer punch cards. In
the same way, he supposed that these dislocations could act as a store of information.
Kahr wanted to test whether this pattern of dislocations would be inherited by the daughter crystal,
and how many mutations new dislocations would be introduced when a daughter crystal broke
off.
To avoid some of the experimental difficulties that Braun foresaw, Kahr used crystals of potassium
hydrogen phthalate, which were easier to work with than clay. "Clays are just lousy crystals," he says.

Clay crystals can take many shapes (Credit: Ted Kinsman/Science Photo Library)
Kahr and his team developed a technique to map the screw dislocations of mother and daughter
phthalate crystals. They found that they could see the dislocations mapping on from mother to
daughter crystal quite neatly. The results were published in 2007.
Fewer mutations would have been "more like life as we know it now"
However, they were surprised by just how many additional defects appeared in the daughter crystals
after they had broken off. The daughter crystals were riddled with these "mutations", and typically
had at least as many new dislocations as inherited ones.
That was a problem for Cairns-Smith's ideas. If the crystals were to gradually evolve, there needed to
be more inheritance than mutation, so that mothers could have a strong effect on their daughters'
pattern of dislocations.
"For this to be a convincing demonstration, you can't go from a frog to a monkey in a single
generation," he says. Fewer mutations would have been "more like life as we know it now".
However, Kahr is not the only one to have explored Cairns-Smith's ideas.

People have found myriad uses for clay (Credit: Ashley Cooper/Science Photo Library)
Rebecca Schulman, a bio-engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, was also
inspired by the crystals-as-genes hypothesis.
She had found a way to represent and copy information, in crystal form
In a series of experiments published over the last decade, she has designed a system where
information is coded in a crystal structure. Rather than using naturally-occurring minerals, Schulman
used crystals of nanometre-scale tiles that were made of DNA.
This DNA did not carry information in the way that it usually does in our cells. Instead, Schulman
used it like Velcro to stick the tiles together in a crystal structure. It was the order of the tiles that
encoded the information.
"If we could build any kind of crystal based on the very simple physical rules that we know crystals
must obey, then it's possible to imagine interesting evolution processes that could emerge in relatively
simple environments," she says.
Schulman found, first through computer simulation and then by experiment, that the DNA tiles could
stack up in a particular pattern, effectively encoding information in a crystal structure. She had found
a way to represent and copy information, in crystal form.

The early Earth was a strange place (Credit: Richard Bizley/Science Photo Library)
On a theoretical level, her findings are useful for studies of the origin of life. "Part of the goal for
origin-of-life research is very broadly to ask how one can design systems in chemistry where
information can be replicated," says Schulman.
He could never get funding
However, Schulman's studies do not show that Cairns-Smith's theory is correct. For one thing, her
experiments did not use clay. More broadly, just because the process works in the lab does not
necessarily imply that life on Earth really began that way.
That is about it for rigorous experimental tests of the crystals-as-genes idea. Cairns-Smith himself
tried for years to put his ideas to the test, but made little headway.
"He could never get funding," Dorothy says. A major stumbling block to securing research grants was
that his work straddled too many different disciplines.

One of Cairns-Smith's artworks (Credit: Martha Henriques)

"One time we went to California, and Graham gave lectures to the Menlo Park Geology Survey," says
Dorothy. "They all said, well, your geology's fine but I don't think your chemistry's right. Then he
gave a lecture to NASA on the chemistry side and they said, well, your chemistry's fine but I'm not
sure about your biology. And then he lectured to Berkeley and they said, well, your biology's fine but
I'm not sure about your geology."
I was supremely disappointed by people who think that more complicated ideas are more likely to be
true
Cairns-Smith found a more eager audience in science journalists and the popular press. Other
scientists showed interest, too: the evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins discussed the
crystals-as-genes hypothesis in his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker.
Eventually Cairns-Smith's publisher encouraged him to write a popular science book on his ideas.
Entitled Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, it was published in 1990. Written in the style of a murder
mystery, it is about as gripping as a book on organic chemistry can get.
Cairns-Smith says he enjoyed writing for wider audiences, because putting a point simply and
intuitively held a satisfaction for him. "I was supremely disappointed by people who think that more
complicated ideas are more likely to be true," he says.
But despite his best efforts, his ideas did not enter the scientific mainstream.

"I'm puzzled generally speaking at why some things in science seem to catch on and others seem not
to catch on," says Kahr. "There's no accounting for popular taste."

A chunk of clay (Credit: Trevor Clifford Photography/Science Photo Library)

But even if Cairns-Smith's specific ideas never pan out, there are two ways in which they continue to
influence the science of the origin of life even today.
Until now, origin of life research was really chemistry-dominated
The first is that they raise the question of what constitutes life, and offer a way in which life-like
processes can arise without familiar molecules like DNA.
"It's a good idea to look around beyond what biology is really teaching us," says Braun. "Why not
scope out the possibilities quite widely? I'm all in for that."
Secondly, Cairns-Smith's multidisciplinary approach fusing biology, chemistry and geology was
way ahead of its time.

Bacteria are some of the simplest forms of life (Credit: Christian Jegou, Publiphoto
Diffusion/Science Photo Library)
"Until now, origin of life research was really chemistry-dominated," says Braun. But in the last
couple of decades, it has become broader: as well as trying to make the key chemicals of life,
researchers are also using genetics to work out what the earliest life was like, and using geology to
figure out the conditions in which it formed.
The specific scenario he envisaged may well be completely wrong
"I guess people will still see it as a little bit of an oddity, but he was really pointing us in the right
direction," says Braun. "People now realise that life is not arising just in water in a glass flask, but in
all the chemistry of the environment and from geology. That's his legacy: to say, look in more detail
at rocks."
There may never be hard evidence for Cairns-Smith's ideas. "If this were to be a huge scientific
enterprise, if there were huge technology behind it, there would be enough resources to really push
the experiments," says Braun. "But it's really just a very small community, and this is a little bit too
far out."
However, the lack of evidence will not be Cairns-Smith's real legacy. The specific scenario he
envisaged may well be completely wrong. But in terms of inspiring people to look at the question of
life's origin in new ways, his work has punched well above its weight.
Update 30 August 2016: Since this article was published we have learned that Graham Cairns-Smith
died on 26 August 2016

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Organisms might be quantum machines

Few of us really understand the weird world of quantum physics but our bodies might take
advantage of quantum properties

By Martha Henriques

18 July 2016
If theres any subject that perfectly encapsulates the idea that science is hard to understand, its
quantum physics. Scientists tell us that the miniature denizens of the quantum realm behave in
seemingly impossible ways: they can exist in two places at once, or disappear and reappear
somewhere else instantly.
The one saving grace is that these truly bizarre quantum behaviours dont seem to have much of an
impact on the macroscopic world as we know it, where classical physics rules the roost.
Or, at least, thats what scientists thought until a few years ago.
Quantum processes might be at work behind some very familiar processes
Now that reassuring wisdom is starting to fall apart. Quantum processes may occur not quite so far
from our ordinary world as we once thought. Quite the opposite: they might be at work behind some
very familiar processes, from the photosynthesis that powers plants and ultimately feeds us all to
the familiar sight of birds on their seasonal migrations. Quantum physics might even play a role in
our sense of smell.
In fact, quantum effects could be something that nature has recruited into its battery of tools to make
life work better, and to make our bodies into smoother machines. Its even possible that we can do
more with help from the strange quantum world than we could without it.

Photosynthesis looks easy (Credit: Morley Read/Alamy)

At one level, photosynthesis looks very simple. Plants, green algae and some bacteria take in sunlight
and carbon dioxide, and turn them into energy. What niggles in the back of biologists minds, though,
is that photosynthetic organisms make the process look just a little bit too easy.
Its one part of photosynthesis in particular that puzzles scientists. A photon a particle of light
after a journey of billions of kilometres hurtling through space, collides with an electron in a leaf
outside your window. The electron, given a serious kick by this energy boost, starts to bounce around,
a little like a pinball. It makes its way through a tiny part of the leafs cell, and passes on its extra
energy to a molecule that can act as an energy currency to fuel the plant.
Photosynthetic organisms make the process look just a little bit too easy
The trouble is, this tiny pinball machine works suspiciously well. Classical physics suggests the
excited electron should take a certain amount of time to career around inside the photosynthetic
machinery in the cell before emerging on the other side. In reality, the electron makes the journey far
more quickly.
Whats more, the excited electron barely loses any energy at all in the process. Classical physics
would predict some wastage of energy in the noisy business of being batted around the molecular
pinball machine. The process is too fast, too smooth and too efficient. It just seems too good to be
true.

Inside the photosynthetic machinery (Credit: Kim Taylor/naturepl.com)

Then, in 2007, photosynthesis researchers began to see the light. Scientists spotted signs of quantum
effects in the molecular centres for photosynthesis. Tell-tale signs in the way the electrons were
behaving opened the door to the idea that quantum effects could even be playing an important
biological role.
This could be part of the answer to how the excited electrons pass through the photosynthetic pinball
machine so quickly and efficiently. One quantum effect is the ability to exist in many places at the
same time a property known as quantum superposition. Using this property, the electron could
potentially explore many routes around the biological pinball machine at once. In this way it could
almost instantly select the shortest, most efficient route, involving the least amount of bouncing
about.
Quantum physics had the potential to explain why photosynthesis was suspiciously efficient a
shocking revelation for biologists.
I think this was when people started to think that something really exciting was going on, says
Susana Huelga, a quantum physicist at Ulm University in Germany.
Quantum physics had the potential to explain why photosynthesis was suspiciously efficient a
shocking revelation for biologists
Quantum phenomena such as superposition had previously been observed mostly under highly
controlled conditions. Typical experiments to observe quantum phenomena involve cooling down
materials to bitingly cold temperatures in order to dampen down other atomic activity that might

drown out quantum behaviour. Even at those temperatures, materials must be isolated in a vacuum
and the quantum behaviours are so subtle that scientists need exquisitely sensitive instruments to see
whats going on.

Can quantum physics explain photosynthesis? (Credit: RooM the Agency/Alamy)

The wet, warm, bustling environment of living cells is the last place you might expect to see quantum
events. [But] even here, quantum features are still alive, Huelga says.
Of course, just because these quantum features make an unexpected appearance in living cells, it
doesnt necessarily mean that theyre playing a useful role. There are theories as to how quantum
superposition may be speeding up the process of photosynthesis, but a hard link between this
behaviour and a biological function is still missing, Huelga says.
The next step will be having some quantitative results saying that the efficiency of this biological
machine is this due to quantum phenomena.

How do robins know which way to fly? (Credit Photoshot License Ltd/Alamy)
Quantum effects in biology arent just a quirk of plants and other organisms that do the peculiar job
of turning sunlight into fuel. They may also provide an answer to a scientific puzzle thats been
around since the 19th Century: how migratory birds know which way to fly.
Quantum effects in biology might explain how migratory birds know which way to fly
In a journey thousands of kilometres long, a migratory bird such as the European robin will often fly
to southern Europe or North Africa to escape particularly cold winters. This journey over an
unfamiliar landscape would be dangerous, if not impossible, without a compass. Start the journey in
the wrong direction and a robin setting off from Poland might end up in Siberia rather than Morocco.
A biological compass isnt an easy thing to picture. If there was some form of tiny magnetic iron
needle-like structure spinning deep inside a robins brain or eyes, biologists would almost certainly
know about it by now. But no such luck: a biological structure that could do the job has never been
found.
Another theory, first proposed in the late 1970s, suggested an alternative way birds might know
which way to fly: perhaps they carry a chemical compass that relies on quantum phenomena to tell
which way is north.

Chemical compasses may rely on quantum spin (Credit: Andrey Volodin/Alamy)

Peter Hore, a chemist at the University of Oxford in the UK, says that such a chemical compass
would work with the help of molecules with excitable lone electrons, known as radicals, and a
quantum property known as spin.
Electrons in molecules usually come in pairs, spinning in opposite directions and effectively
cancelling out each others spin. A lone electron spinning on its own, though, isnt cancelled out.
This means it is free to interact with its environment including magnetic fields.
A lone electron spinning on its own is free to interact with its environment including magnetic
fields
As it turns out, Hore says, robins can become temporarily disorientated when exposed to radio waves
a type of electromagnetic wave of a particular range of frequencies. If a radio wave has a
frequency of just the same rate that an electron spins, it could cause the electron to resonate. This is
the same kind of resonance you might experience when you sing in the shower certain notes sound
a lot louder and fuller than others. Hitting the right radio wave frequency will make the electron
vibrate more vigorously in the same way.
But what does this have to do with the idea that birds use a chemical compass? The theory is that
ordinarily, radicals at the back of the birds eye respond to the Earths magnetic field. The magnetic
field will cause the electron to leave its spot in the chemical compass and start a chain of reactions to
produce a particular chemical. As long as the bird keeps pointing in the same direction, more of the
chemical will build up.

So the amount of this chemical present is a source of information, generating signals in the birds
nerve cells. As part of many different environmental cues, this information will inform the bird about
whether it is pointing towards Siberia or Morocco.

A bird's nervous system tells it where to go (Credit: Tim Gainey/Alamy Stock Photo)
The radio wave observation is an important one because we would expect anything that interferes
with electron spin to be able, at least in principle, to disrupt the chemical compass. It can be as useful
to study why something sometimes doesnt work as it is to study why it generally does work.
Even so, the quantum compass remains an idea. It hasnt yet been found in nature. Hore has been
focusing on finding out how the quantum compass can work in principle, using molecules that
theoretically ought to be able to do the job.
The quantum compass remains an idea it hasnt yet been found in nature
Weve done experiments on model compounds to establish the principle that one can make a
chemical compass, Hore says. These have helped to pin down some molecules that do seem to be fit
for the purpose of detecting magnetic fields, he says. What we dont know is whether they behave in
exactly the same way inside a cell in the birds body.
The magnetic compass is just part of a complex and poorly understood system of navigation in birds,
Hore says. The quantum theory for how such a compass works may be the best out there so far, but
theres still a lot of ground to cover to link up the behavioural patterns of birds with the theoretical
chemistry.

The science of smell (Credit: Cultura Creative RF/Alamy)

There is one field that seems tantalisingly close to demonstrating the reality of quantum biology,
though: the science of smell.
Exactly how our noses are capable of distinguishing and identifying a myriad of differently shaped
molecules is a big challenge for conventional theories of olfaction. When a smelly molecule wafts
into one of our nostrils, no one is yet entirely sure what happens next. Somehow the molecule
interacts with a sensor a molecular receptor embedded in the delicate inner skin of our nose.
Exactly how are our noses capable of distinguishing and identifying a myriad of differently shaped
molecules?
A well-trained human nose can distinguish between thousands of different smells. But how this
information is carried in the shape of the smelly molecule is a puzzle. Many molecules that are
almost identical in shape, but for swapping around an atom or two, have very different smells.
Vanillin smells of vanilla, but eugenol, which is very similar in shape, smells of cloves. Some
molecules that are a mirror image of each other just like your right and left hand also have
different smells. But equally, some very differently shaped molecules can smell almost exactly the
same.
Luca Turin, a chemist at the BSRC Alexander Fleming institute in Greece, has been working to crack
the way that the properties of a molecule encode its scent. There is something very, very peculiar at
the core of olfaction, which is that our ability to somehow analyse molecules and atoms is
inconsistent with what we think we know about molecular recognition, Turin says.

He argues that the molecules shape alone isnt enough to determine its smell. He says that its the
quantum properties of the chemical bonds in the molecule that provides the crucial information.
According to Turins quantum theory of olfaction, when a smelly molecule enters the nose and binds
to a receptor, it allows a process called quantum tunnelling to happen in the receptor.
When a smelly molecule enters the nose and binds to a receptor, it allows quantum tunnelling to
happen
In quantum tunnelling, an electron can pass through a material to jump from point A to point B in a
way that seems to bypass the intervening space. As with the birds quantum compass, the crucial
factor is resonance. A particular bond in the smelly molecule, Turin says, can resonate with the right
energy to help an electron on one side of the receptor molecule leap to the other side. The electron
can only make this leap through the so-called quantum tunnel if the bond is vibrating with just the
right energy.
When the electron leaps to the other site on the receptor, it could trigger a chain reaction that ends up
sending signals to the brain that the receptor has come into contact with that particular molecule.
This, Turin says, is an essential part of what gives a molecule its smell, and the process is
fundamentally quantum.
Olfaction requires a mechanism that somehow involves the actual chemical composition of the
molecule, he says. It was that factor that found a very natural explanation in quantum tunnelling.
The strongest evidence for the theory is Turins discovery that two molecules with extremely
different shapes can smell the same if they contain bonds with similar energies.
Turin predicted that boranes relatively rare compounds that are hard to come by smelled very like
sulphur, or rotten eggs. Hed never smelt a borane before, so the prediction was quite a gamble.

Boranes smell like rotten eggs (Credit: Dimitri Otis/Alamy)

He was right. Turin says that, for him, that was the clincher. Borane chemistry is vastly different in
fact theres zero relation to sulphur chemistry. So the only thing those two have in common is a
vibrational frequency. They are the only two things out there in nature that smell of sulphur.
While that prediction was a great success for the theory, its not ultimate proof. Ideally Turin wants to
catch these receptors in the act of exploiting quantum phenomena. He says they are getting pretty
close to nailing those experiments. I dont want to jinx it, but were working on it, he says. We
think we have a way to do it, so were definitely going to have a go in the next few months. I think
that nothing short of that will really move things forward.
Turin wants to catch these receptors in the act of exploiting quantum phenomena
Whether or not nature has evolved to make use of quantum phenomena to help organisms make fuel
from light, tell north from south, or distinguish vanilla from clove, the strange properties of the
atomic world can still tell us a lot about the finer workings of living cells
There is a second way of seeing how quantum mechanics interacts with biology, and that is by
sensing and probing, Huelga says. Quantum probes would be able to shed light on many interesting
things in the dynamics of biological systems.
And whether or not nature got there first, its no excuse for us not to mix biology with quantum
phenomena to develop new technologies, she says. Making use of quantum effects in biologically
inspired photovoltaic cells, for instance, could give solar panels a huge boost in efficiency. At this

very moment there is quite a lot of activity in organic photovoltaics, to see whether with natural or
artificial structures one can have an enhanced efficiency that exploit quantum effects.
So even if alternative, as yet entirely unknown mechanisms emerge for these stubborn biological
puzzles, biologists and quantum physicists certainly wont have seen the last of each other. This will
definitely be a story with a happy end, she says.

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