Question

Scientifically, at what point does a cell or cells become a living thing? What structures and functions of a cell make it living?

Answer 1

Basically Cells are living things because they are able to perform and carry out different functions which enable it to sustain itself ........
A cell is made up of organic matter which creates organelles or structures all capable of response, stimuli, growth and development into more complex organisms or any contiguous life-form .

Answer 2

this is what i think, that makes a cell a living thing,
hope it helped !

Answer 3

The definition of being in a state called alive is not very clear at the cellular level...
I mean u can say.... a person who is brain dead i.e brain stem got damaged is dead.....
But at cellular level.... even is you destroy whole cell but keep its genome (DNA , RNA ) intact.... and transfer it into some other type of cell's nucleus....the later cell's whole morphology will change to the former's type.... so you can not say that the 1st cell died.....
In fact some scientist believe that only those cells with cytoplasm should be considered alive...... then what about virus ( DNA + protein capsid no cytoplasm )...or viroids (only naked RNA )..... they still replicate but only when inside some other cells ..... should they be considered alive.....
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there is a lot of controversies on this topics......
What I think of a cell or a Virus ..or Viroid ,... is that they are just a kind of software or in complete sense hardware ..... and they should not be considered alive...
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being alive comes from the fact that we are conscious ( from where this consciousness is generated is not known ).

Answer 4

as a cell (not individual components), at the point when all the respiratory process (energy metabolism) stops we can call its as dead.

Answer 5

How ever I like to quote Campbell and Reece:
"What is life? Even a small child realizes that a dog or a plant is alive, while a rock or lawn mower is not. Yet the phenonmenon we call life defies a simple, one-sentence definition. We recognize life by what living things do." They mention as an example the following properties:
Order. Evolutionary adaptation. Response to the environment. Reproduction. Growth and development. Energy processing. Regulation.

However on cell level I agree that the cell metabolism is one of the most obvous ways to look open the cells is dead or not.

Answer 6

But i like to point out another thing then: incase we say that metabolism is a key feture to recognize life in a cell.... then inorganic life have been made - a concept many biologys don't think can exist.

Answer 7

I think the question here is bound to 'cell' not to life.
Life in simple terms is the characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased (death), or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate (source wikip)- we can use this explanation to cellular level too