Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi summarized it eloquently: “Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water. Life could leave the ocean when it learned to grow a skin, a bag in which to take the water with it. We are still living in water, having the water now inside.”21 As poetry, this is a graceful ode to water and life. As science, there is as yet no argument to establish the statement’s universal validity, but we know of no form of life that challenges the necessity of water.
