What is Life?

In 1944 the physicist Erwin Schrödinger published a book with the intriguing title What is Life?

It was based on a series of lectures he had given in the previous year in which he applied his understanding of physics to see what it might tell us about life. Our more ‘modern’ culture might dismiss this book because “he’s not a biologist, so what the fuck does he know?” Stay in your lane, you despicable killer of cats.

What’s most interesting about this book, for me, is not so much the insights he is able to derive but the approach he takes. If we’re going to understand life, or how it arose, we have to understand the constraints placed upon it by physics.

We, and all life, are entropy-generating entities converting free energy in order to maintain our state of negative entropy. We maintain order, but we have to make the universe a bit more disordered to do it. When the lights go out, the process of decay, entropy, can no longer be held back. But what, exactly, is it that’s keeping the lights on?

Nobody knows.

One minute you’re an active thinking, feeling, marvellous biological ‘machine’ and the next you’re just a clump of chemicals that’s rotting away. All of the same chemicals are there before and after, but what, really, has changed?

The processes of life require energy - and it really is a quite remarkable set of mechanisms that have evolved to supply that energy. We’re made up of a bunch of specialized cells, all working together and pretty much all of these cells require an energy supply. How that happens is almost too incredible - and very complex. One of the key molecules involved is something called ATP (adenosine triphosphate) and this gets ‘used up’ and ‘re-made’ in an astonishingly complicated sequence that ends up providing energy for the cell. You pretty much recycle your own bodyweight in ATP every single day.

proton flux through the mitochondrial ATPase synthase complex occurs at an estimated rate of 3 × 10^21 protons per second. This corresponds to ATP reformed at a rate of 9 × 10^20 molecules/sec, or approximately 65 kg ATP recycled per day in a normal resting adult

OK, I don’t know how to do superscripts on here, but that 3 × 10^21 means 3 times 10 to the power of 21. It looks like this :

3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 protons per second

That’s a whole lot of protons. Your cells are doing this every second until the lights go out. We might think we’ve built amazing industrial processing plants, but, really, we’ve such a loooooooong way to go before we can even begin to replicate the ability of a cell.

Pretty much every cell in your body is powered like this and mitochondria generate the ATP that is needed - and typically an animal cell will have between 1,000 and 2,000 of these mitochondria. Mitochondria themselves are fascinating - they appear to be a legacy of a bacterial infection - one which established a symbiotic relationship. This bacterial legacy can be seen in various ways, but it seems possible we all evolved from an infected slime mold. Somewhat less appealing than having descended from the apes, perhaps.

Even if you’re not religious it’s hard not to form the view that life is a bloody miracle.

So what are we to make of the recent furore over the leaking of a SCOTUS draft opinion on abortion?

I do have a personal bias on this issue. Myself and my brother were adopted. Neither of us have ever tried to contact our respective biological parents. For me, I never saw the need - my real parents were great, why the hell would I want another set?

But I can’t help wonder just how fortunate I might have been not to have been conceived a few decades later. My mum and dad had 4 kids, before they adopted us, but they all died before they reached 3 years old - some genetic defect. My mum’s experience has led her to the view that, had she known, she would have undergone abortions. I can’t really criticize her for that because I cannot even begin to fathom what she and my dad went through.

All this does is to underline, for me, just how complex the issues of the abortion ‘debate’ are.

There are no easy answers here, but central to it all is that thorny question of what is life?

Some people have argued that whatever it is that’s growing in the womb it’s not ‘life’ until it’s outside that sanctuary. It’s not a baby, it’s a foetus, is another common statement. My nephew was born somewhat prematurely - he’s now a hulking brute with arms like tree trunks and I have to strain my neck if I don’t want to have a conversation with his nipples. One minute he was a foetus with no right to life (in the eyes of some) and the next he was a baby struggling for life with all the resources of a NICU bent on supporting his right to life.

My niece was stillborn. That precious and much-wanted life ended in the womb. The grief and heartache were no less than if she had died minutes after birth - presumably an entirely different biologic entity, in the eyes of some.

I do my very best to try to get behind the stances of others and despite my snark in these articles, in real life my approach is always to try to understand the human being with an attitude of there, but for the Grace of God, go I.

I confess I have a devil of a job understanding those who celebrate abortion, or who want abortions right up to full-term to be legal (and some, apparently, have even argued for ‘abortion’ post-birth which is something I cannot wrap my head round, if true). I can’t find any common ground, or empathy, for the position that what’s developing in the womb is some kind of parasite and the female a ‘host’ for this alien thing.

The “my body, my choice” argument doesn’t wholly work for me, because what’s growing inside is not your body - but an entirely different body with its own DNA. Is what’s growing merely a potential for life, or life itself? It certainly doesn’t have an independent existence for some months, but modern medicine means that even very premature babies can now survive and go on, in the fullness of time, to lead an independent existence. But independence cannot really be a criterion here because we’re all dependent on others, and completely dependent in those fragile first years. The only difference, really, is the location of that dependence - inside or outside the womb.

But none of my concerns and questions here really address whether someone who has conceived should be forced, by law, to continue with that pregnancy. That’s a separate issue and depends on the value that is placed on this developing life. For women who want to conceive, this ‘thing’ has incredible value - and the grief of a stillbirth, or miscarriage is testament to that. For those who don’t want to conceive, or who view conception as an ‘inconvenience’ the question of value is different - should it be society’s values imposed here, or the personal values of that individual?

I don’t think we should be overly swayed by those at the extremes. There are some women who seem to think of a developing baby more as a kind of cancer that must be removed, but I think the majority of women understand, in a way that I cannot, the seriousness and consequences of termination. I don’t think the majority of women view abortion as a trivial thing, or simply a matter of convenience. But maybe that’s based on discussions with women of my generation and doesn’t apply to newer generations - I don’t know. I could be wrong, but terminating a pregnancy is, I believe, not an easy decision for most women. If, say, you’re married and already have 2 kids at school and are barely surviving on 2 incomes and, despite your best efforts, you conceive - what then? It might depend on what kind of support - either from family or neighbours or government is available. But I can well imagine circumstances in which another child could break a family.

Like so many of these difficult issues I don’t really have any easy answers - and I rapidly descend into a morass of competing moral imperatives that I can’t hack my way through. But until we really do understand what life is just a little bit better I would adopt a more cautious, or conservative, stance.

Consider 3 scenarios - and I know there is some artificiality here, but these kind of things help us to shape our principles - are our principles absolute, or conditional upon circumstance?

scenario #1

In this room we have a termination, at 28 weeks, of a pregnancy

scenario #2

In this room a baby is delivered, prematurely, at 28 weeks and everyone works like crazy to ensure its survival

scenario #3

In this room a baby is delivered, prematurely, at 28 weeks and the doctor strangles it immediately after it is born

How do we distinguish the different morality in these three different scenarios?

What is life? And how, and when, do we value it?

---