Bernd-Olaf Küppers, professor of natural philosophy at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, has long focused his attention on basic questions of natural science and the philosophy of science at the borders of physics, chemistry, and biology. His scientific interests cover a wide range of problems that are centered on the fundamental question of the origin and evolution of life. A graduate of Göttingen University where he studied physics, astrophysics, and mathematics, he went on to study with Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen and received a Ph.D. in biophysics in 1975. After a brief period of research at Columbia University, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen until 1993. The following year he was a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and held a distinguished visiting professorship awarded by the Japanese government. Named to his present position in 1994, he served as director of the world renowned Institute of Philosophy at the University in Jena. Dr. Küppers is a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina and of the Academia Europaea, a corresponding member of the Académie Européene des Sciences, des Arts et des Lettres, and an honorary member of the Center of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences in Buenos Aires. For his contributions to the theoretical foundation of biology, he was awarded the Woitschach Research Prize in 1971 and, in 1999, a honorary doctorate by Nagaoka University of Technology in Japan. Dr. Küppers is co-editor of the international journal Philosophia Naturalis and a member of the editorial boards of several other international journals. The author of some one hundred scholarly papers, he has served as editor or co-editor of three books and is the author of four others, including Molecular Theory of Evolution (1983 and 1985), a presentation of his physico-chemical theory of the origin of life, Information and the Origin of Life (1990), in which he approaches the evolution of living systems from the perspective of modern information theory, and, most recently, Natur als Organismus, a re-examination of Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy of nature, which was published by Verlag Klostermann in 1992.