Reply To: I found this lets discuss.

[Unseen]

SteveInCO wrote:

Actually, biology uses “organism” for something that’s living (not a precise definition), so one could refer to an embryo as a “human organism” without claiming it as a “human life” in the legal sense.

Actually, biologists aren’t 100% comfortable with the word “life.” What “life” is can be a distraction for them. Should viruses be studied by biology? Technically, according to some commonly-used definitions, viruses aren’t alive at all.

“First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, viruses today are thought of as being in a gray area between living and nonliving: they cannot replicate on their own but can do so in truly living cells and can also affect the behavior of their hosts profoundly.” From Are Viruses Alive? in Scientific American.