In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire cat has a habit of disappearing, leaving only his grin, prompting Alice to remark that she has ‘often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat’. Many biologists experience similar bemusement when, despite knowing how thermodynamics operates in living cells and how genes encode everything that is required to form the cell, the mystery of what life really is continues to grin back at them.
