Life itself.*
“This is indeed the question of questions: What is life? What is it that enables livings things, apparently so moist, fragile, and evanescent, to persist while towering mountains dissolve into dust, and the very continents and oceans dance into oblivion and back? To frame this question requires an almost infinite audacity; to strive to answer it compels an equal humility.”

For centuries, scientists have been trying to answer this question of questions: “What is life?” To the ancients, life simply was. Life was a first principle by which other things were to be explained. With the rise of Newtonian mechanics in the 1700s, life itself vanished a first principle, a given, and began to be regarded more as a machine, just another waystop on the remarkable roadbed of reductionism, with its 400 year history of success in translating science into useful technology. But in recent years, there has been a growing awareness that something important, something critical, has been lost by reducing the study of life to separated projects within the walls of traditional academic disciplines. What is required is a new approach, highly-interdisciplinary in practice, and fully engaged with the emerging discipline of complexity theory.

At Virginia Commonwealth University, this new approach is enacted through VCU Life Sciences, a university-wide matrix academic organization that includes more than 150 faculty members in 35 departments in 11 schools on the Monroe Park and MCV campuses. The unique reporting relationship of VCU Life Sciences allows for a comprehensive weave of new curricula and research initiatives between the two campuses. From these efforts, new perspectives, new methods of investigation and new questions related to life and its complexities have surfaced, and scientific breakthroughs are occurring at a rapid rate in the field now known as life sciences.

But the challenge of life sciences research is not solely limited to progress in the laboratory. It has entered the public forum. Now, more than ever, ethical considerations must accompany the rapid advances in the life sciences. VCU Life Sciences has robust activities at the local, regional and national level to increase public literacy in the life sciences and to provide an important neutral assessment of American public attitudes toward the life sciences.

At VCU, we embrace the entire scope of challenges of the life sciences revolution of the 21st century. Drawing on the resources of our Monroe Park Campus, the MCV Campus, the Rice Center for Environmental Life sciences and the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park, VCU Life Sciences integrates our teaching, research and clinical faculty — to strengthen existing life sciences-related departments and to create and sustain new academic and research programs within VCU Life Sciences.

View the VCU Life Sciences video.

*Robert Rosen, Life Itself, 1991. p. 11. Columbia University Press, New York.