Thinking: Is a virus a living life?

According to foreign media reports, the virus is infectious, and some can make us sick.
such as the infamous Ebola virus and HIV.
they are small, very small, and in fact they don't even have some of the basic characteristics of being life, so there is a view that they are not life.
virus can be classified as a lifeline? It depends on how you define life.
, such as plants and animals, have cellular structures that have the ability to divide and multiply.
each cell contains DNA or RNA, which is genetic information about life.
, the virus is more like free-form DNA or RNA, and if it is removed from its host, there is no way the virus can multiply on its own.
Otto Yang, a professor of medicine, microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, says they must invade living cells to replicate themselves.
is packaged RNA and DNA that hijacks cells for self-reproduction, " says Mr Otto.
" virus a living life?Countless philosophers and scientists have debated for a long time what life is.
They give a rough idea of the seven basic characteristics of life - that life must be able to respond to external stimuli, grow and develop, produce offspring, maintain proper body temperature, have metabolism, consist of one or more cells and be able to adapt to their environment.
but carefully thought out, some lives do not seem to meet all of these conditions.
such as hybrid animals, such as horses and donkeys, have no way of breeding mules, because mules are not fertile.
if you look at other things, you'll find that rocks can "grow", albeit in reverse (rocks are weathered by erosion and broken down).
but it's all about complicating things.
if we adopted a simple multi-definition approach, things would be completely different.
You can put a cat, a plant and a stone in a room for a few days," said Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician at Johns Hopkins University Health Center in the United States.
when you open the house again, you'll notice that cats and plants have changed, but the stones are basically the same.
stone, if you leave it in the room, most viruses won't change.
addition, Adaga notes that living life experiences a living instinct and spontaneous action, and that they take steps to try to prolong their lives.
, for example, plants extend their roots in search of moisture, and animals run around looking for food.
but the virus, like a stone, does not have this active act of life-seeking.
I don't think viruses are good enough to be counted as a life, they're inherently inactive unless they can invade the inside of living cells," Adaga said.
of course, there are features that bring them close to the boundaries of life: they have genetic material: DNA or RNA.
of course there is a fundamental difference between this and a stone, but it is also clear that they are very different from bacteria because they do not have the instinct to live and act spontaneously.
, Otto Young agrees, saying, "The virus can't replicate itself without cells."
at this level, viruses really can't be classified as life -- if you define independent reproduction as a necessary condition of life.
However, if this standard were relaxed to read 'what can be defined as life, whether independently or with outside help, can be self-replicated', then viruses that can replicate themselves with the help of cells could certainly be counted as a kind of life.
" Some view is that the earliest form of life on Earth was some kind of RNA molecule.
Yang points out that RNA molecules can replicate themselves under certain appropriate environmental conditions, and perhaps today's viruses are inherited from such an ancestor, but over the course of a long evolution, they have lost the ability to replicate independently.
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