BOSTON, Massachusetts -- Stephen Hawking, the British physicist and scholar on the origins of the universe, told an audience at a Boston computer show this week that computer viruses should be considered a "life form."


In a speech about the nature of life, Hawking, a physicist at Cambridge University, said a computer virus fits the definition of a living system even though it has no metabolism of its own. Instead it uses the metabolism of a host computer and is parasitic.


"I think computer viruses should count as life," Hawking said in a keynote speech at Macworld Expo -- a show for Apple Computer enthusiasts in Boston.


"I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image," he said.