The eminent crystallographer J. D. Bernal wrote in his The Origin of Life (1967):

“Life is beginning to cease to be a mystery and becoming a cryptogram, a puzzle, a code that can be broken, a working model that…while removing most of the mysteries of life, it has not reduced in the minds of scientific biologists any of the appreciations of its complexity and beauty”. Ideas about life might need to be rethought:

The individual might die but the particles making up the individual had almost planetary immortality – in a thought similar to Zen Buddhism – would just be reconfigured.

The important thing was “the effective immortality of life itself, that is the effective immortality of genetic carrying nucleic acid molecules”.