Transcript:

What is Life - RadiobesIn the history of science, there are times when it's been difficult to distinguish between what's alive and what isn't. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.Zimmer in 1905 physicist named John Butler Burke made a tremendous announcement. The world newspapers carried it. It appeared that Burke had actually created life from scratch. He had mixed together radium - a radioactive element, with sterile beef broth, and out of that had emerged incredibly primitive microbe-like things and when he looked at them under the microscope they seemed to to grow, to take on structures and even divide and then die. Science writer Carl Zimmer is the author of the book "Life's Edge."So Burke named these things radiobes. And for very short while the world believed that maybe life itself began as radiobes on the early Earth.We don't remember John Butler Burke today because it didn't take very long before other scientists figured out that what he was looking at were just chemical contaminants in his experiment. But he went on throughout his whole life until he died in 1946, believing that he had really found the fundamental nature of life.And I love the story radiobes because I think it gets across just how powerful this question of "what is life" (is), and also how dangerous it can be to try to answer it, because we can we can be fooled by mirages. Because when you get to the borderland between the living and the nonliving it's very hard to tell what you're looking at.Our thanks to Carl Zimmer. More stories on the nature of life in future programs. Check out our website pulseplanet.com for some exciting news. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.