Taking its title from a landmark 1944 book by the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? propels the debate about the nature of life into the twenty-first century. Ed Regis offers readers an accessible and tantalizing tour of emerging technologies in genetic engineering, attempts to create synthetic life in laboratories, medical advances that prolong the existence of brain-dead patients, and other recent advances that have raised highly publicized debates about the definition of life in this era of cutting-edge science. What Is Life? informs and enlightens from a fresh philosophical perspective.

The discussion topics that follow are designed to enhance your reading of Ed Regis’s What Is Life? We hope they will enrich your experience as you explore these provocative questions about the essential nature of humanity and the universe we inhabit.