Sir

Sunetra Gupta, in her poetic and accurate Millennium Essay on vitalism, concludes that “we remain inclined to believe that the analysis of life does not detract from its ultimate mystery”. Vitalism as biological metaphor survived for so long, she says, because it provided a basis for retaining our primary experience of life as a mystery at the same time that we decompose the mystery through scientific analysis.

Holding these two ideas together may be seen as a form of cognitive dissonance, a state of mind producing considerable discomfort and mental disorder. Allegiance to our current metaphor — 'life is a machine' — has led to much progress in medicine and agriculture, for example, but also caused great harm to human beings and the worldwide environment.

Many formal mathematical and other scientific arguments deny the machine model in biology, and it might be a good start to reveal these arguments to our students more than we do now.

We could start, perhaps, with Niels Bohr's worry that “the minimum freedom we must allow the organism will be just large enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its secrets from us”1, and end with Diethard Tautz's treatment of a biological equation equivalent to Heisenberg's uncertainty relationship in physics suggesting that attempts to predict biological function from genetic information may require “experiment on an evolutionary scale”2.

Our inclination to believe in life's ultimate mystery appears to have a declining vitalistic (or any other) force in the machine world of everyday life. Gupta does a real service in reminding us how important metaphor is in science. Just perhaps, we could find something closer to our primary experience of life than our current machine metaphor as we approach the analysis of living things.

A little bit of scientific philosophy and physical theory like this might, if not vitalize, then at least brighten up those deterministic lectures in Molecular Biology 101.