What is Life?
What is Life?
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written in 1818, during a period when Romantic ideas, Gothic literature, and new scientific discoveries were becoming popular.
Cultural context: Society was fascinated by Gothic stories, the supernatural, death, and the idea of creating life. Romanticism also emphasized emotion, nature, individuality, and the dangers of uncontrolled ambition.
Scientific context: Scientists were making discoveries about electricity, anatomy, and the human body. Experiments such as galvanism suggested that electricity might cause dead muscles to move, leading people to wonder whether electricity could somehow restore life.
The monster: Shelley’s creature reflects these fears and fascinations. Victor Frankenstein uses scientific knowledge to create life, but he fails to consider the ethical responsibility that comes with his discovery.
One of the most important scientific contexts for Frankenstein is that, in Shelley’s time, the origin of life was still a major mystery. Scientists did not yet understand cells, DNA, genetics, or modern biology, so ideas about how life began were very different from today.
Spontaneous generation: A widely discussed idea was that simple living organisms could arise from non-living matter. For example, some people believed insects or microorganisms could emerge from decaying material. Although the idea had been questioned for centuries, it remained part of scientific debate during Shelley’s lifetime.
Vitalism: Many scientists and philosophers believed that living things possessed some special “vital force” that distinguished them from dead matter. Life was therefore not simply a collection of physical processes—it seemed to involve something mysterious that science had not yet explained.
Galvanism and electricity: This is particularly important to Frankenstein. Experiments with electricity showed that electrical stimulation could make the muscles of dead animals twitch or contract. Luigi Galvani’s experiments in the late 18th century became famous, and his nephew Giovanni Aldini later performed dramatic public demonstrations using electricity on animal and human bodies. These experiments encouraged speculation about whether electricity might be connected to the force of life itself.
Anatomy and dissection: Medical scientists were gaining much greater knowledge of the human body through anatomical dissection. Researchers could study organs, muscles, nerves, and the effects of injury and disease. Shelley therefore lived in a period when people were increasingly able to understand the physical mechanisms of the body, while still lacking an explanation for what actually made a body alive.
The boundary between life and death: Because resuscitation techniques and electrical experiments were developing, people were increasingly interested in the point at which a person actually became “dead.” This made the idea of restoring life particularly fascinating—and frightening.
Shelley never gives a precise scientific explanation for how Victor creates the creature. Instead, she deliberately leaves the process mysterious. Victor says that he discovers a way to “animate” dead matter, but Shelley doesn’t explain the technology.
In Frankenstein, “reanimation” means crossing the boundary between death and life: Victor takes a body that is dead and somehow causes it to become alive. This reflects early 19th-century fascination with whether death could be reversed through scientific intervention.
Modern techniques such as CPR and defibrillation can be understood as a real-world, controlled version of this broader idea of reanimation. When someone suffers cardiac arrest, they may appear dead because their heart has stopped pumping blood. CPR attempts to maintain circulation and oxygen delivery to the brain and other organs, while defibrillation can stop certain dangerous heart rhythms so that the heart may resume an effective rhythm. In this sense, medicine can sometimes reverse a state that would otherwise progress to irreversible death.
The important distinction is that CPR and defibrillation do not literally bring a dead person back to life in the way Frankenstein’s creature is created. They are forms of resuscitation, used when the body is in a potentially reversible state. Once irreversible biological death has occurred, these techniques cannot simply restore someone to life.
The distinction becomes much clearer if we separate “living tissue” from “a living organism / person.” A transplant is an example to demonstrate that these are not equivalent concepts.
Living tissue vs. a living being
When a human being dies, death does not mean that every cell in the body instantly dies at exactly the same moment. Different tissues have different tolerances to the loss of oxygen, blood flow, and metabolic support.
For example, after circulation stops:
The person as an integrated organism can no longer maintain the coordinated functions necessary for life.
Individual cells and tissues may remain biologically viable for some period of time.
Some organs can be removed and preserved precisely because their cells have not yet undergone irreversible damage.
If those organs are placed into another living body and supplied with oxygen, nutrients, blood flow, appropriate temperature, etc., they can resume or continue their normal biological functions.
A donated heart is a particularly useful example. A heart removed from a deceased donor can be preserved outside the body and subsequently transplanted into another person. The heart’s cells are living cells, and the heart is living tissue, even though it is temporarily outside a living human organism.
A living human being isn’t simply a collection of living cells. It is an integrated biological system in which organs and tissues continuously interact to maintain the organism as a whole.
This means “death” and “cellular death” aren’t necessarily the same instantaneous event.
There can be a period in which:
The organism is dead, while some of its constituent biological material remains alive.
In a transplant we remove living tissue and place it in another living host. We are not removing the living being and placing them in a different host.
Dr. Robert J. White performed a pioneering and controversial head transplant of a rhesus monkey in 1970 to test the feasibility of whole-body replacement surgery. Because the spinal cord was severed, the monkey was completely paralyzed from the neck down. However, cranial nerves remained functional: the animal could hear, smell, taste, follow objects with its eyes, and even wake up to try to bite a researcher. The monkey survived for about nine days before the body’s immune system rejected the foreign head and the animal died.
This would only be possible if it was living tissue being transplanted.
Flipping the table exposes an important conceptual problem: “life,” “living tissue,” “organism,” and “person” are not necessarily the same category. It also helps to separate biological questions from philosophical and legal ones.
From fertilization to organism
If we follow the biological process, we can describe it without immediately deciding whether it constitutes a “person”:
Fertilization → embryo → implantation → differentiation → organogenesis → fetal development → birth → postnatal maturation
From fertilization onward, the embryo is not merely a collection of random living cells. It is a developing biological organism: its cells are alive, dividing, differentiating, communicating, and organizing themselves according to developmental processes.
That gives us a fascinating parallel with the distinction we made earlier:
An organ can be living tissue without being a living person.
But the embryo presents almost the reverse problem:
It is a developing organism, but whether we should call that organism a “person” is not answered by biology alone.
At fertilization, something genuinely biologically significant happens: a new developmental trajectory is initiated, and the resulting organism undergoes continuous biological activity and development.
But biological activity ≠ cognition ≠ consciousness ≠ personhood.
For example, we wouldn’t infer personhood merely because:
cells are metabolically active;
cells are dividing;
the embryo implants;
organs begin developing;
the heart begins beating;
circulation develops;
the nervous system becomes increasingly complex.
All of those are biological facts. The question “When does this become a person?” introduces a different kind of question.
The heartbeat is a particularly interesting example
A fetal heartbeat is sometimes treated rhetorically as though it provides a definitive answer to the question of when “life” begins. Biologically, however, it demonstrates something more specific:
The developing cardiovascular system has begun coordinated activity. It doesn’t establish that the fetus has consciousness, cognition, self-awareness, or personhood. This is analogous to an organ-transplant example. A heart can beat because its cardiac tissue is biologically active. Autorhythmicity is the unique ability of specialized cardiac muscle tissue to generate its own electrical impulses spontaneously and rhythmically without external nervous stimulation. A beating heart isn’t, by itself, evidence of a living human individual.
The same principle can be applied in the other direction: absence of cognition doesn’t necessarily mean absence of biological life.
Cognition introduces another threshold
If we’re asking not “When does biological life begin?” but rather:
“When could there plausibly be an individual capable of experiencing the world?”
Then development of the nervous system becomes much more relevant. But even here, there isn’t a single biological switch that turns non-person → person.
Neural development is continuous. Different components develop at different times:
The more defensible claim is that the neurological substrate necessary for increasingly complex sensory processing develops progressively during gestation, while the precise point at which conscious experience becomes possible remains scientifically uncertain. At around 24 weeks there is a measurable presence of REM like activity. The importance of REM activity is its association to dream like states in living individuals. While we ca not state it is evidence of a living individual with a personality – it is much more like a living person than at fertilization.
An individual cell can be alive without being an organism. A transplanted organ can be living tissue without being an organism. An embryo / fetus can be a developing organism without that biological description alone answering the philosophical question of personhood. And an adult human can be biologically alive while brain dead, demonstrating that consciousness and biological life aren’t synonymous either.
Life support: sustaining an organism
Consider several technologies:
Mechanical ventilation can replace or substantially assist the work of the lungs.
Dialysis can replace important functions of the kidneys—removing waste and excess fluid and helping regulate electrolytes.
ECMO can provide oxygenation and/or circulation when the lungs or heart cannot adequately perform those functions.
Artificial nutrition and hydration can provide metabolic substrates and fluid when a person cannot eat or drink.
Mechanical circulatory support can partially or substantially replace the pumping function of the heart.
The remarkable thing is that none of these technologies needs to create life. They substitute for particular biological functions that an organism would normally perform for itself.
That gives us another important distinction:
A person can remain biologically alive while some of the functions necessary to sustain that life are being performed by machines.
And that leads directly to the difficult question: how much external support can we provide before we are merely sustaining biological processes?
There isn’t one technological endpoint
This is where the situation becomes genuinely complex.
Suppose someone’s lungs completely fail, but their heart and brain remain functional. Mechanical ventilation or ECMO may temporarily substitute for respiratory function while the lungs recover.
If the kidneys subsequently fail, dialysis can substitute for renal function.
If the heart fails, mechanical circulatory support may substitute for some cardiac function.
In principle, therefore, multiple physiological systems can be supported simultaneously.
But the objective is ordinarily not to keep every individual cell alive indefinitely. The goal is to maintain the integrated human organism, ideally long enough for the underlying disease or injury to become reversible—or to reach another viable intervention, such as transplantation.
Living tissue can exist for a period of time without a living person, life support is attempting to maintain the person as an integrated organism. How long can this actually continue?
There isn’t a single “longest time on life support,” because life support encompasses very different technologies and clinical situations.
For ECMO specifically, extraordinary durations have been documented. A 13-year-old was supported with ECMO for 394 days while awaiting heart transplantation, subsequently received a transplant, and was reported alive two years later.
There have also been cases of more than a year of ECMO support for respiratory failure. One published case describes 403 days of ECMO while awaiting lung transplantation.
And an especially striking case involved a child whose lungs were essentially nonfunctional for almost 20 months while ECMO maintained gas exchange; the child ultimately recovered lung function. The authors described it as the longest successful ECMO case at the time of publication.
So there isn’t a fixed physiological rule saying “after X days, life support becomes impossible.” The limits are imposed by the biology of the patient, complications, the technology, and the possibility of recovery or transplantation.
But “can we keep the body functioning?” isn’t the only question. Eventually, medicine encounters a much harder question: What exactly are we trying to preserve?
Imagine two hypothetical patients.
Patient A: Their lungs have catastrophically failed, but their brain is functioning normally. ECMO keeps them alive while their lungs recover.
Patient B: Their heart, lungs, kidneys, and other organs can all be maintained artificially, but they have suffered irreversible loss of the brain functions necessary for consciousness and the integrated functioning of the organism.
Technologically, both might involve machines maintaining physiological processes. But ethically and medically, they are profoundly different situations.
In the first case, technology is temporarily substituting for a damaged organ while the person remains capable of recovery.
In the second, the central question becomes whether the individual has died according to the applicable medical / legal definition, and whether continued physiological support has any therapeutic purpose.
That’s why brain death is such a crucial concept in modern medicine. It isn’t simply “the brain isn’t working very well.” It involves the irreversible loss of the functions of the brain as a whole, and its diagnosis is governed by specific medical criteria and applicable law.
And this brings us back to the original framework. We started with Frankenstein and the idea of reanimation. But reality turns out to be considerably more interesting. We can maintain living cells after an organism has died. We can preserve and transplant living organs from a deceased person. We can temporarily replace the functions of failing organs with machines. We can sometimes restart circulation after cardiac arrest. We can sometimes maintain an organism for extraordinarily long periods while waiting for an organ to recover or be transplanted.
Yet none of these facts gives us a simple definition of “life.”
A fertilized egg is no different than a body on life support. There is no question the cells are alive, but personhood cannot be established.
A progression in the Genesis narrative
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” – Genesis 2
Matter precedes life
Genesis describes God forming Adam “from the dust of the ground.”
In the framework we’ve been building, this resembles the distinction between physical material and living biological organization. The body is formed from earthly material, but the narrative does not describe the mere formation of the body as the completion of the human being.
The “breath of life” is a distinct moment
Genesis 2:7 then describes God breathing the breath of life into Adam, after which Adam becomes a living being. That gives us a conceptual sequence:
formed body → breath of life → living being
And this is particularly interesting given our earlier discussion of the difference between living tissue and a living organism. The biblical narrative doesn’t simply say that God constructed a body and therefore had a living man. It describes a transition. Of course, we shouldn’t translate “breath of life” directly into a modern biological mechanism. The Hebrew concept is richer than simply oxygen entering the lungs. But as a philosophical observation, the text distinguishes the physical formation of the body from its becoming a living being.
Now look at the crucifixion accounts.
Matthew says:
Jesus “gave up his spirit.”
Mark says:
Jesus “breathed his last.”
Luke gives both ideas together: Jesus commits his spirit to the Father, and then breathes his last.
John likewise says that Jesus bowed his head and “gave up his spirit.”
Then, critically, the body doesn’t disappear. It is taken down, placed in a tomb, and remains a physical body.
So, as an observation of the narrative, you have a kind of inverse sequence:
living person → breath/spirit departs → physical body remains → burial
And that does create an interesting symmetry:
Creation:
dust/material → body → breath of life → living being
Death:
living being → breath/spirit departs → body remains → returns to the earth
“The instant Jesus died, every molecule and cell of his body became biologically dead.”
That’s not how biological death works. Rather, the integrated human organism ceases to be alive, while different cells and tissues undergo death on different timescales. The physical body therefore remains after the person’s death and subsequently undergoes the biological processes associated with death and decomposition.
There isn’t a contradiction between:
“Jesus died”
and
“Jesus’ physical body remained.”
Nor is there a contradiction between the biblical language of giving up the spirit and the biological observation that the physical tissues don’t instantaneously cease all cellular activity.
Ecclesiastes 3:19–21,fits very well with the distinction we’ve been developing because the passage deliberately refuses to make an easy distinction between humans and animals at the level of physical death.
The passage says:
“For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other.”
— Ecclesiastes 3:19
It then emphasizes that both have the same breath and that both return to dust.
“Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?”
— Ecclesiastes 3:21
That’s a fascinating qualification Ecclesiastes is essentially saying – At the level of observable physical death: humans die; animals die; both breathe; both return to dust; but where one goes and the other one stays … The wording “Who knows?” is important. Ecclesiastes isn’t claiming to have scientifically demonstrated what happens to the human and animal spirit after death. It is explicitly presenting the matter as an unresolved question from the perspective of human observation.
Human and animal → observable biological death → both return to dust
But what happens to the spirit? → “Who knows?”
We can also argue the inverse
When does the spirit of man enter? → “Who knows?”
Only God!