Title :
Living electronic artefacts
Author_Institution :
Centre Suisse d´´Electronique et de Microtechnique SA, Neuchatel, Switzerland
Abstract :
The frontier between living and non-living beings is very mobile. Every new month brings its new definition to “what is a living being?”. The authors´ tentative definition, inspired by Monod (1970) is the following: Life is a pattern in space-time rather than a specific object. Gradually, due to the degeneration principle, each and every one of the components of the pattern is destroyed and is replaced some time later. To this end, the pattern embeds a blueprint used for building, assembling as well as maintaining the self. This blueprint is inherited from the ancestor(s) during the reproduction process. When the destroyed components can no longer be replaced, the organism degenerates and dies. This principle has been transposed to electronics artefacts, enabling them to exhibit self-repeating properties
Keywords :
cellular biophysics; living systems; reviews; ancestor; death; degeneration principle; inheritance; living electronic artefacts; living system blueprint; organism degeneration; self assembling; self building; self maintenance; self-repeating properties; space-time pattern; Anatomy; Animal structures; Assembly; Biological system modeling; Biomedical optical imaging; Birds; Cells (biology); Electron microscopy; Optical microscopy; Organisms;
Conference_Titel :
Microtechnologies in Medicine and Biology, 1st Annual International, Conference On. 2000
Conference_Location :
Lyon
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-6603-4
DOI :
10.1109/MMB.2000.893786
