Are specialized cells considered to have life?
Life is defined in many ways.
Common definitions are usually simplified definitions. Under some definitions it would be &quot;life&quot; under others it would not be. But it doesn't matter. The problem you are having is thinking definitions of life are anything more than artificial categorization. Really there is no difference between living things and the rest of chemistry, or at least there is a smooth gradient connecting them, but we humans can't easily think that way, so we create descriptive but imperfect definitions to help our thought processes. There is a lot of gray area for any definition of life, and you have found one.