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Francisco J. Varela died on May 28,2001 from hepatitis C complications. With his untimely death, Francisco left behind his mother, his wife Amy, four children, a sister, innumerable students and collaborators, and a vast intellectual legacy. His work, comprised of well over 200 publications, was characterized by bold excursions into the boundaries of our knowledge on cognition and neuroscience. His intellectual legacy stands firmly planted in biological empiricism and mathematical formalisms and it towers into the rarified domains of cognition, consciousness, neuroscience, and methodologies for the study of first-person experiencing. He was a pioneer in the interdisciplinary exploration of these subjects.
Francisco was born in Santiago, Chile in 1946. He completed his basic education at Verbo Divino, a private Catholic school of German origin. In 1964 he entered the Medical School at the Catholic University in Chile. Francisco and his colleague Julio Vergara challenged one another to leave the comfort of a medical career for the uncertainty of a career as researchers. Both left medical school and joined the Biology Department at Universidad de Chile.
Francisco received a Masters degree in Biology in 1967 from Universidad de Chile. There he met Humberto Maturana, who became his friend and mentor. The story is told that, upon meeting Humberto, Francisco said, "I want to understand the psyche of the universe." In response, Humberto replied "Very well, let's start with the eye of the pigeon." Their fruitful collaboration produced the theory of autopoiesis. Autopoietic theory defines living beings as autonomous entities that produce their own components and whose organizational dynamics are determined by the network of relationships among those components. Given his strong mathematical background, Francisco was able to expand and formalize the notion of autonomous biological systems thus extending his influence from neuroscience to artificial intelligence. Francisco stepped into the scientific limelight for the first time in the late 60's with his research on neuronal regeneration. In...