News from nowhere
A matter of life and death
Pick an apple from a tree and put it in your fruit bowl. While it was on the tree, the apple was clearly alive. Is it now dead? Or still alive? Or neither, somehow?
What about your kidney? It’s clearly a part of your living body. But say you donate it to someone. When it leaves your body, is it still ‘alive’? It seems to be in a similar state to the apple, until it’s transplanted into someone else and becomes a living part of their body.
Nature throws up countless threshold examples like this, from viruses to toenail clippings. Until recently we could happily ignore most of them. For most of history, working out whether people were living or not was straightforward enough: breathing, heartbeat, and consciousness
