What Is Life?
Edited by Stefan Helmreich, professor and Elting E. Morison Chair in MIT Anthropology; Natasha Myers PhD '07; Sophia Roosth PhD '10; and Michael Rossi PhD '11, in association with Katrin Klingan and Nick Houde; includes a chapter by Evelyn Fox Keller, professor emerita of the history and philosophy of science in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society
Stefan Helmreich · HKW · 2022 · Summer 2022
"What is life?" is a question that has haunted the life sciences since Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Gottfried Treviranus independently coined the word "biology" in 1802. The query has titled scores of texts, with Erwin Schrödinger's 1944 book and Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's 1995 volume only the most prominent. In this inventive art-and-science book, the editors curate and comment upon a collection of first pages of publications from 1829-2021 entitled "What Is Life?"