Life. There is something strange about this term. Everybody knows what it is, but nobody can really explain what it is. In our everyday lives, the meaning of this term is somehow contained in the context we use it. In science, no theory of life exists. A huge army of teachers and researchers active in all disciplines of life sciences hardly share common ground. Life scientists are bound together by a loose band of a few interesting phenomena observable in nature. This is strange, but does not appear to be troublesome, since teaching and research work well.
The scientific lack of understanding what life actually is, is probably only an academic problem, but an interesting one! And that is where the essay "The Nature of LIFE" starts. Apparently, biologists have accepted this lack of understanding and spend no more effort to fill this gap of knowledge. Possibly, pure biological means are not enough to explain life. Possibly, a new approach from outside can help. Possibly, new insight from a discipline like Informatics can lead to a better understanding of life. And actually, there is something common in biological and computer systems: information-processing.
Learning to interpret all sorts of biological activity as information-processing uncovers a common pattern in all phenomena of life. This common pattern may show a way to a theory of life and allows to draw some interesting implications. Scientists of all biological disciplines may be able to agree. If this is really going to happen, life scientists would have a solid common ground, a better understanding for each other and would possibly collaborate even better than today.
