What do you consider living or nonliving. Scientist have been trying to categorize everything in two categories living and nonliving. Some things are easy to identify such as a rock or an animal everyone knows which is living. But sometimes it’s not that easy to identify, like in the case of viruses. Are viruses living or nonliving? That is a question that has brought a lot of terrifying debates.There is no precise definition of what separates the living from the non-living. But for many reason I believe that viruses are not living. Viruses are considered non-living because they do not have the requirements to be categorized as a living thing for example reproduction. Viruses cannot multiply among their own species asexually or sexually. Opponents …show more content…
According to “are viruses alive” by clift note(2016) “Viruses have no energy metabolism, they do not grow, they produce no waste products, and they do not respond to stimuli. They also don't reproduce independently but must replicate by invading living cells.“ For these reasons and more viruses are not considered alive. How can you call and organism living if it cannot respond to stimuli or does not produce energy nor growth. Viruses are completely dependent on host cells to be able to survive.“Viruses are not considered alive because they lack many of the properties that scientist associate with living organism. Primarily, they lack the ability to reproduce without the aid of a host cell, and do not use the typical cell-division approach to replication”according to wikipedia(2016). This demonstrate that viruses are not living because they can not survive by themself. Viruses are nonliving because they lack certain characteristics such as reproduction, responding to stimuli etc. Some people think that viruses are alive because they have some characteristics that living organisms have but in reality they have those characteristics because living things provide them with them. That is how they are able to reproduce by the help of its host. Scientists all over the world agree that viruses are nonliving because “they lack many of the properties that scientists associate with living organisms”according to scienceline.ucsb.edu