(IN)ORGANIC

"I can make urea without needing to have kidneys, or anyhow, an animal, be it human or dog."-Friedrich Wöhler

It’s becoming apparent that there’s something special about life. Thermodynamically, cosmologically, probabilistically – life seems to overcome the inherent obstacles which would make any sane person question the likelihood of their own existence. Yet amongst this grandeur, wonder and humbling beauty, a question hangs over the entire affair – what is life? Pinpointing the exact moment when lifeless, inanimate matter transforms into a living entity is difficult, and a question which needs answering - fast. When laboratory created life, artificial intelligence, and human augmentation all seem inevitable rather than an impossible there is a lingering doubt - when does the inorganic become organic? What’s alive and what’s not?

Historically, ascribing a material or chemical as part of life or not was an unambiguous affair – the two great kingdoms of organic and inorganic chemistry were supposed to be unequivocally separate. Vitalism, a belief that living things were of a different constitution to inert matter, underwent a resurgence in the early 19^th century on the discovery of chemicals such as chlorophyll, which had no known comparably complex inorganic counterpart. Life was chemically complex, irreproducible, and beyond the chemical abilities of man.

However, chemicals which were once intrinsically aligned as components of life came to have their allegiances questioned. Urea is something which we’re all reassuringly familiar with as a component of urine. At a molecular level urea consists of an atom each of oxygen and carbon, a couple of nitrogen atoms, and a smattering of hydrogen – atoms as natural and abundant in life as it comes. To question whether urea is organic is elementary, almost pedantic, isn’t it? A chemical produced by my wonderfully fleshy body can be classed as organic indisputably.

But urea can also be produced inorganically – by heating the undeniably chemically sounding potassium cyanate and ammonium chloride. Is the urea produced by this reaction, known as the Wöhler Synthesis, organic? What if I also told you that urea can be produced in a test tube with the hydrolysis of arginine to ornithine using the catalyst arginase? Although this may sound inorganic, but it’s the exact reaction that occurs in each and every one of our body’s cells countless times, requiring all that micturition.

Urea is but one of a multitude of biochemically relevant molecules which can be whipped up in a lab over the course of an afternoon. Even the crowning glory of life – DNA, can be manufactured to order, pieced together with a machine comparable in size and complexity to that of a breadmaker.

So is urea inorganic or organic, a thing of life or the lab? Does the source of our urea make a difference? I’m sure that some sources of urea are preferable to others, but is our glossy catalogue-ordered DNA part of the rich tapestry of life, or an inferior doppelganger - incapable of fully realising the potential of naturally synthesised DNA? Are these chemicals natural or not?

It’s a distinction which is becoming increasingly redundant. As was widely reported in the press, Craig Venter’s “artificial life” – an experiment which essentially swapped organically produced DNA for DNA made in the lab – illustrated that artificially produced DNA seems to be just as capable as the organic.

Just as the Wöhler Synthesis undermined Vitalism – experiments like Venter’s are at the forefront of deciding what we choose to describe as part of life, and what (if any) reverence we choose to ascribe to it. The truth is that atoms give very little thought to whether they are in blood or bottle rockets (iron), in pyrotechnics or plants (magnesium), or are found in chalk or cheese (calcium). If the conditions are correct, atoms may conspire to make some “life” happen. Is this breadmaker-made DNA, produced in a “non-canonical” manner, part of biology? Does it break the contiguity of life?

It’s a problem with wide implications. If DNA produced artificially is classed as organic, where does that leave transgenic animals (animals produced using DNA from multiple genomes – the source of images depicting glowing green rabbits)? Surely if I add two pieces of organically made DNA together, the resultant verdant rodent is organic – and yet our gut feeling rejects this as inorganic.

It’s becoming apparent that science is able to blur the once distinct line of natural and unnatural with increasingly unnerving ease. Deciding what is part of our inherited biology – Life 1.0, and what is not - may help allay public fear over the newest advances in science. If we can accept that human endeavours which dabble in the stuff of biology - from “Frankenstein Foods” to limb regeneration – are wholly separate from Life 1.0, and are man-made artifices of nature, the acceptance and incorporation of new technologies may be far easier.