“Is life special, so special that we cannot understand it, much less create it? Are living things endowed with some sort of special power, force or property that distinguishes the inorganic from the organic, the living from the dead? Can life be nothing more than the precise interaction of physical stuff?
Scientists, theologians and philosophers have been wrangling over this issue for eons. For many, the wondrous nature of what permits something to be alive has been a mystery that science never, ever could penetrate. Life is sacred, special, ineffable and beyond human understanding. Except it isn’t.
Science has continued to struggle with the reducibility of life to the material. Meanwhile, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, among other religions, have maintained that a soul constitutes the explanatory essence of at least human life.
All of these deeply entrenched metaphysical views are cast into doubt by the demonstration that life can be created from non-living parts, albeit those harvested from a cell. Venter’s achievement would seem to extinguish the argument that life requires a special force or power to exist. In my view, this makes it one of the most important scientific achievements in the history of mankind.
What seemed to be an intractable puzzle, with significant religious overtones, has been solved.”
Arthur Caplan is Sidney D Caplan Professor and the Emmanuel and Robert Hart Director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Scientific American Magazine
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