Dr. Fleischaker is undertaking an 18 month research and training postdoctoral program with Dr. Richard Lewontin of Harvard University. The center of her study and research is a program to define living systems operationally. What may seem to be something obvious, i.e. whether something is "alive" or not, becomes very problematic in areas of science like virology or in attempts to determine whether life exists on other planets. Investigators who are trying to determine how life arose on this planet also need to have a clear definition of what it means to be "alive." By working with Professor Lewontin, one of the leading geneticists in the world, Dr. Fleischaker will attempt to show the necessity for defining life in origins-of-life research, extraterrestrial investigations, virology, and cybernetics, making a broad case for system-operational criteria of what constitutes being "alive." She will then attempt to make explicit the assumptions underlying contemporary origins-of-life research, pointing to the strengths of the minimal-system approach emerging as a recent branch from the traditional lines of research in this area. Finally, she will treat the active interchange across the boundary of any living system as necessary from its embeddedness in the immediate surroundings. She questions the notion of autonomy of living systems in the light of ecological nestedness, and hopes to provide an operational definition of "the individual" (as opposed to the traditional morphological definition of "organism") in the context of symbiotic relationships, extending their different degrees of spatial intimacy to local and global communities.
