What is life?

Everyone has a different answer to this question. Everyone sees life a little differently. A poet, a philosopher, the pope, a physicist and a chemist have different views and ideas of what life is. For the chemist, life is mainly the production of complex molecules like sugar from solar energy and carbon dioxide.

And how did it come into being? From the origin of the life on the earth up to the emergence of homo sapiens 3.5 billion years have passed. About 70,000 years ago, man was able for the first time to think something that does not exist. That was the birth of our culture. I will present some important events of this time to explain how we humans understand ourselves and the world.

Renée Schroeder is an Austrian researcher and university professor at the Department of Biochemistry at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna. From 2003 – 2012, Schroeder was elected the second woman member of the Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The Talk was held on March 14 2017 as part of the series AIL-Talks.