Life Itself (A): How Do We Get Energy to Live by?

Abstract

Life! This wonderful thing! What is it to be alive? Where did life come from? How do living things operate themselves? There are a number of different kinds of living organisms on this planet. How are they related and different from each other? How have they evolved? These are “biology” questions. But they require some answers from chemistry as well. We do not have all the answers yet, though. The chemical bases of the organisms currently living on the Earth are fairly well understood, thanks to the scientists’ efforts in the last hundred years or so, particularly in the last half a century. We have now a discipline called “molecular biology” or “chemical biology,” which strives to understand the biological phenomena, particularly those associated with genes (DNA) in terms of chemistry. Yet we have not come to a full understanding of even the lowly bacterium, say, an E. coli, in so much as we may recreate it. We have no more than the vaguest ideas about how life might have begun on the Earth.