Charts how revolutions in genomics, bioinformatics, and remote sensing have pressed marine biologists to see the sea as animated by its smallest inhabitants: marine microbes.
Stefan Helmreich Books
January 1, 1966
Stefan Helmreich is a professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work examines how scientific understandings of life are shaped by social and cultural imaginaries. He explores how people around the globe think about what it means to be alive, particularly in the context of the deep ocean and artificial intelligence.
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.
Sounding the Limits of Life
- 328 pages
- 12 hours of reading
What is life? What is water? What is sound? In Sounding the Limits of Life, anthropologist Stefan Helmreich investigates how contemporary scientists—biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers—are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual. Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, Helmreich follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, he offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. He develops a new notion of "sounding"—as investigating, fathoming, listening—to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis. Sounding the Limits of Life shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.
What Is Life?
- 165 pages
- 6 hours of reading
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.