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RESEARCH PRODUCT

What Is Life?

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Despite the difficulty of defining a living being, biological sciences have considerably advanced. Today many authors feel the need to revisit the issue of the definition of life, among other reasons, because we are very close to have a second example of life. This life will not be the direct result of more than 3,500 million years of evolution, but the outcome of a project of synthetic biology in a laboratory. The fact that evolution has explored only a small part of the possible may pave the way towards alternative artificial lives. Focusing on the nature of life makes us more critical with the Cartesian comparisons between cells and machines. At the same time, progress in synthetic biology will allow us to better understand the organization of biological complexity.