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Nature 408, 767-768 (14 December 2000) | doi:10.1038/35048757

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. . . we need a metaphor to explain life's mystery

Richard Strohman1

  1. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, 229 Stanley Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-3206, USA

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.