Grew up a few streets from where van Leeuwenhoek's workshop once stood and spent an embarrassing amount of a childhood trying to grind her own lenses out of bottle glass, badly. Came to autopoiesis through cell biology, not philosophy, and still thinks of Maturana and Varela's definition the way van Leeuwenhoek must have felt looking through his own lens for the first time, the sense of finally having language for something she had been staring at her whole career. Keeps an actual, cheap toy microscope on her desk next to genuinely expensive lab equipment, on the theory that the feeling of looking closely should never get too dignified to remember where it started.
IACSInt'l Academy for Consciousness Studies