Magic Without Magic

That evocative phrase of the physicist John Archibald Wheeler is probably even more apropos for biology than for physics. The problem in biology was the seeming unbridgeable gap between living and non-living. From Aristotle to Descartes to Huxley, biologists were forced to invoke some magic - some vital principle mysteriously present in organic matter - in order to explain life. Of course Descartes and Huxley tried to reduce it to mechanism, but always their ideas collided with the complexity and purposefulness of life.

Leonardo da Vinci conceived of biological systems as machines at least 500 years ago, and Descartes made it a cornerstone of his philosophy a bit more than a century later, but three plus centuries more were needed before biology (and physics, chemistry and biochemistry) could penetrate to the essence of that magic. That magic without magic is modern molecular biology, especially the revelation of the workings of DNA and its translation into proteins.

Only with that science in place could a proper attack on the origin of life actually begin. It is a vast and sprawling scaffolding that's required: a little quantum mechanics, a lot of chemistry, all of biochemistry and molecular biology, astronomy and geology. With all that, the stage can be set. The actors are not yet known, though a host of aspirants are auditioning. The play, however, remains to be written.