Robert Rosen in La Recherche

[Athel Cornish-Bowden <***>]

Judith wrote:

> > PS: I think people may be more aware in France, if a recent email I
> > received is any indication. They wanted a picture of Robert Rosen to
> > go along with text which was to be part of a big anniversary issue
> > of some magazine. The story was about the "giants of the life
> > sciences" and Dad's name was in a list with people like Schrodinger!
to which I replied:

> I can't easily imagine who could be behind this!
This is now in the October 2005 issue of La Recherche (No. 390), in 
an article by Juli Peretó, Jesús Català and Álvaro Moreno entitled 
"Qu-est-ce que la vie ?" on pp. 36-40. I haven't seen the whole issue 
of the magazine yet, but one of the authors sent me a copy of the 
article. They are Spanish, incidentally, not French, so in relation 
to Judith's point they may be evidence of an interest in Robert Rosen 
in Spain. Álvaro Moreno has published previously on (M,R) systems 
[Morán, F., Moreno, A., Minch, E., Montero, F., 1996. Further steps 
towards a realistic description of the essence of life. In Langton, 
C. G., Shimohara, K., editors, Artificial Life V, pages 255-263. MIT 
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts], so we were aware already of his 
interest in this subject.

Morán et al. (1996), can be constructed from simplified rules representing

It does indeed include a photograph of Robert Rosen in a list where 
he appears with Gerald Joyce, Francisco Varela and Erwin Schrödinger, 
under the caption "Ils ont étudié la question" (presumably the 
question of what is life, though it doesn't say so). They describe 
Rosen in the following terms: "biologiste théoricien décédé en 1998, 
fut professeur de biophysique à l'université Dalhousie de Halifax, au 
Canada. Pour lui, la différence essentielle entre un organisme vivant 
et une machine tient à la récursivité des processus qui ont cours 
dans le premier."

In the text, they say "Tout dépend  donc de tout, ce qui constitue un 
fascinant mystère. Cette circularité, ou récursivité, marquait pour 
le théoricien de la biologie Robert Rosen, décédé en 1998, la 
différence essentielle entre une machine et un organisme : dans ce 
dernier, chaque élément étant causé par un autre élément, le système 
est causalement clos."

athel


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Athel Cornish-Bowden
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