One of the hallmarks that shows living things are not like non-living things in nature is that when you take them apart to study the pieces, you cannot put them back together again and still have a living thing.
Or put another way, in life, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (Rosen et al).
As I have testified many times on these threads, I believe that information (successful communication) holds the answer for mathematicians/scientists (esp. physicists invited to the biology table) who must ignore theological/philosophical solutions per the principle of methodological naturalism.
Like other math theories it is highly portable among science disciplines. And applied to molecular biology for pharmaceutical and cancer research, it reads like this: information is the reduction of uncertainty (Shannon entropy) in the receiver or molecular machine as it moves from a before state to an after state.
As long as an autonomous thing in nature is successfully communicating its message (DNA) that thing is alive. If it never could communicate, it is non-life. And if it no longer is communicating, it is dead.
It would be a theological statement at the heart because there is no physical origin for information (successful communication) in the universe.
As a whole, science is not ready to give up the Newtonian paradigm in biological research. Most still believe that living things are like non-living things, they should be able to take them apart and put them back together again, i.e. Frankenstein.
We could call it the BAMM-BAMM/PEBBLEs Philosophy..
Some think like BB others think like Pebbles..
The infantile Sandbox is "tricky"...
one must watch out for the Schrödinger's Cat Poop..
I.E. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeuAhYd5-dc