Joseph Gross, age 15, of Wichita, Kansas, for his question:
What is life?
Everything in and on our planet is created from about 92 chemical elements. Only about 35 of these elements are used to create all its forms of life. Scientists can explain how many of these biochemicals are used by plants and animals. They can speculate how life orginated on our planet. But so far, nobody can say what life really is. However, ,just wondering about it stretches the brain, warms the heart and helps us to feel at home on this luxurious planet.
Our earth is a treasure house of inorganic minerals, such as rocks and water, and non living energies, such as sunlight and weather. But its greatest treasure is life which comes in about 1 1/2 million different species of animals and plants. They thrive and multiply, live and die and hand on the miracle of life from generation to generation. All living things are made of protoplasm, or cytoplasm, organized in cell units.
Their organic chemicals, or biochemicals, change from moment to moment as the living cells respond to their environment, digest and grow and multiply. Non living things cannot perform these miracles. Yet the rocks, the air and the oceans contain all the chemicals found in living things, plus more than 50 others. The four major elements in living cells are carbon and oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. These and more than 30 others are abundant in the non living world of nature. But only the busy biochemicals have the wondrous, mysterious force we call life.
The greatest wonder is the relationship between life and the non living earth. We are lucky to be alive when for the first time mankind has to face this fact, or perish. We need its breathable air and drinkable water. Most of all, we need to share our generous earth with more than a million different plants and animals.
We cannot say exactly what life is, but maybe we need to keep asking the question. It compels us to accept this most comfortable aspect of life. Surely this is the mysterious union between the earth and her multitudes of dependant children. From her point of view, the name of the game is give and take, a never ending changing and exchanging between the living and the non living.
Ecologists trace the complex chains that link everything together. All life forms depend directly or indirectly upon each other and all of them depend on the non living air, water, soil and other basic resources. When our minds wander into this realm, the question about life tends to get lost in a much bigger picture.
Someday scientists may be able to explain the secret of life, perhaps when we have had more time to find and fulfill our own role in the enormous scheme of things. Then the answer may not seem so urgent. Perhaps it will be enough to know that life is something we share with all the plants and animals. We are all part of it ¬and life is part of all the other infinitely complex business of this smallish planet.