What is life? A Nobel Prize-winning scientist answers | Paul Nurse Full Interview

My name is Paul Nurse. I'm a a geneticist and cell biologist and I run a biomedical research institute in London called the Francis Crick Institute. And I've just written a book. It's my first book and it's called What is Life? [Music] Chapter 1. What is life? I call this book What is Life? because it's the fundamental question in biology. I mean biologists uh study living things and a critical question for us is really what is the difference between something that's alive and something that isn't alive. Now, you might think this is a rather simple question to answer, but in fact, it it's not so easy to answer, and if you look up uh this in Wikipedia or in a dictionary, you often get rather complex answers. And I wanted to address this question, use my background, experience, and thinking about biology for many years to see if I could have a go at answering what I think is one of the key questions in biology. should be said I'm by no means the first person to have considered this question and uh I have built on others in particular a very famous book also called what is life by Schrodinger the uh great physicist in the 1940s there isn't really a very good definition of life and the way I approached it in this book was to take five of the great ideas of biology ology ideas that um most scientists would be very happy with agreeing to that some of them have in fact been around for a number of centuries and exploring those five ideas which are the idea of the cell, the idea of the gene, the idea of evolution by natural selection, the idea of understanding life in terms of chemistry and the fifth idea understanding life in terms of information. All of those ideas are well accepted. Maybe the last one, life as information, is uh is not perhaps as fully accepted as the others, but by exploring those five ideas, explaining where they came from uh because that's quite interesting uh and then seeing what you could extract from those ideas to get some principles about what life was. And that's the approach I decided to use. Chapter 2, the cell, where life begins. The cell is really critical for the way I think about life. And and why is that? It's because it's simplest entity that you can unambiguously think is clearly alive. There's some other life forms where there's some argument about that such as viruses which maybe we can talk about a little