What is the nature of life? In this lecture I will review the revolution

in biological thinking that has dramatically changed how we view life.

I will review such persistent ancient ideas as spontaneous generation

and why it took so long to disprove this notion, the impact of the

microscope on biology, and the discovery of the laws and agency of heredity.

This is obviously a highly-selective view of a vast topic, and my goal is

to highlight those episodes in the history of biology that inform us about

the nature of science (its successes and failures), and which we will concern

ourselves with in the rest of the course. Listeners will note that I do

not introduce Evolution (more precisely, Natural Selection) since that

is a huge other topic for another day. Recorded live on 2009 Oct 1 in

Room 1005 Smith Laboratory on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State

University.