Bahadurs publications were ambivalently received, and the overall attention of the scientific community seemed limited since Krishna Bahadur and his co-workers reported that the Jeewanus are alive (a striking statement), the team changed the protocols frequently and documented them somewhat idiosyncratically. Bahadur defined "living units" as "[...] those which grow, multiply, and are metabolically active in a systematic, harmonious, and synchronized manner". Then, NASAs Exobiology Division tasked two biologists in 1967 to review and evaluate the literature so far published by Krishna Bahadur (not to replicate the experiments) on the synthesis and characteristics of the Jeewanu. The two NASA biologists did not debate whether these three criteria are an adequate definition of life, but whether the Jeewanu satisfy these criteria. The NASA report concluded that "the evidence presented on these three points is on the whole unconvincing". The report also stated that the postulated existence of these living units has not been proved and "the nature and properties of the Jeewanu remains to be clarified."
In the 1980s, the Hungarian chemist Tibor Gánti discussed the Jeewanu at length in his chemoton theory—an abstract model of autocatalytic chemical reactions—published first in Hungarian and translated into English in 2003. In the context of self-organizing structures, Gánti considered the Jeewanu a promising model system to understand the origin and fundamentals of life, and one that had never received due attention. In 2011, a German scientist stated that the Jeewanu story pertains to concepts of life, its beginnings, as well as possible artificially created cells.
Experimental duplication work published in 2013 by Gupta and Rai reported that their size varies from 0.5 μ to 3.5 μ in diameter, growth from within, metabolic activities, and "the presence of RNA-like material". The authors stated that the RNA-like material detected in the Jeewanu protocells support the RNA world hypothesis.