Stefan Helmreich is hoogleraar antropologie aan het Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zijn werk onderzoekt hoe wetenschappelijke inzichten in leven worden gevormd door sociale en culturele denkbeelden. Hij onderzoekt hoe mensen over de hele wereld nadenken over wat het betekent om te leven, met name in de context van de diepzee en kunstmatige intelligentie.
Drawing on ethnographic work among oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry aquatic, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet and its future.
What Is Life?? is a question that has haunted the life sciences since Gottfried Treviranus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck independently coined the word ?biology? in 1802. The query has titled scores of articles and books, with Erwin Schrödinger?s in 1944 and Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan?s in 1995 being only the most prominent ones. In this book, biogroop curate and speculate upon a collection of first pages of publications from 1829?2020 containing ?What Is Life?? in their titles. Replies to the question?and, by extension, the object of biology?have transformed since its first enunciation, from ?the sum of the functions that resist death? to ?a bioinformation system? to ?edible, lovable, lethal.? Interleaved are frame-shifting interruptions reflecting on how the question has been posed, answered, and may yet be unasked.