How come cells are alive, but the pieces that make up them aren’t?
In: Biology
A cell is like a factory. It’s made up of subsections called organelles: one brings raw materials into the building, another is responsible for generating power for the factory, another processes and packs these materials into products to be exported/used elsewhere in the facility, and so on.
When everything is connected and together in its place, the factory works well; remove any subsection and leave it by itself, and it’ll lack something crucial in the production process to be able to function properly.
The cell, our factory in this analogy, is the smallest autonomous functioning unit. There’s no way to go smaller without giving up this autonomy.
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