What is life? A 21st-century reassessment
March 02-07, 2025
Oratorio di Barottoli
Despite tremendous progress in our understanding of what life DOES (metabolism, genetics, physiology), our understand of what life IS remains unclear. The origin of life on Earth, the transition from non-living to living matter—from inert matter to matter with intentionality—remains a deep mystery. How does chemistry become sentient? We revisit this topic, bringing in experts from the sciences but also from philosophy and other approaches to the “science of life” to gauge our current understanding and challenges. Of crucial importance are current and future developments of bioengineering and the genetic manipulation of life, its ethical implications and its impact on the environment.
PARTICIPANTS
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Philip Ball is a British science writer. For over twenty years he has been an editor of the journal Nature, for which he continues to write regularly. He is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine and a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and BBC Future.
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Melanie Challenger is a writer, researcher and broadcaster on environmental history and philosophy of science, Deputy Co-Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and a Vice President of the RSPCA, UK. She wrote How to Be Animal: What it Means to Be Human (2021).
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Robert Miller Hazen is an American mineralogist and astrobiologist. He is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, in the United States. Hazen is the Executive Director of the Deep Carbon Observatory.
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Roberta Raffaetà is associate professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Deputy Director of NICHE (The New Institute: The Centre for Environmental Humanities). She studies the multiple ways people assign value to life in a world where humans and non-humans are interdependent, with a focus on how science is transforming in response to eco-social challenges and technological revolutions. Her work lies at the intersection of medical anthropology, environmental anthropology/political ecology, science and technology studies and art.
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Paul Vanouse is an artist working in Emerging Media forms and a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo. Radical interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism guide his practice. Since the early 1990s his artwork has addressed complex issues raised by varied new techno-sciences using these very techno-sciences as a medium. His artworks have included data collection devices that examine the ramifications of polling and categorization, genetic experiments that undermine scientific constructions of race and identity, and temporary organizations that playfully critique institutionalization and corporatization. These "Operational Fictions" are hybrid entities--simultaneously real things and fanciful representations--intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary electronic landscape.
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Andreas Weber studied biology, specializing in marine ecology, and philosophy in Berlin, Hamburg, and Freiburg. His doctoral thesis, Natur als Bedeutung, explores a semiotic theory of life. As a freelance journalist, he has contributed to various German media outlets and now works as a writer and lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts. He is the author of several books, including Alles fühlt (2007), Lebendigkeit (2014), and Indigenialität (2018). In his nonfiction works, Weber challenges the mechanistic view of life and has received multiple awards for his journalistic and philosophical contributions.
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Meet the Host
Marcelo Gleiser is the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, a world-renowned theoretical physicist and public intellectual. He’s authored hundreds of technical and nontechnical papers and essays, and seven books in English translated to 18 languages. His writings explore the historical, religious, and philosophical roots of science, past and modern. Gleiser is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House, and founder and past director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth. He co-founded National Public Radio’s 13.7 Science and Culture blog, and currently writes weekly for BigThink.com. He is the 2019 Templeton Prize laureate, an honor he shares with Mother Tereza, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and scientists Freeman Dyson, Jane Goodall, Sir Martin Rees, and Frank Wilczek.
Project Co-Leader
William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which was named to several best of 2023 lists, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is co-author with David Castillo of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022). His latest book, on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, was published in January 2024.
