Montreal Gazette - Hunt for fuel of life burned intensely

(Chemistry professor Joe Schwarcz): "Much about life and death can be argued, but not this: life is warm, death is cold. Our final cool-down begins with our last breath. Body heat, it seems, is intertwined with life. But where does it come from?

Plato, Aristotle and Hippocrates philosophized about an innate fire, probably burning in the heart. That was sort of logical since it was clear that at death the heart stops and the body cools down. Science, though, requires more than philosophy, it requires experiments. And the Greeks weren't so hot on that. In fact, neither was anyone else for the next couple of thousand years…"