Title: Living Turing machines

Because relationships between physical objects are at the core of life the study of living organisms stems from symbolic abstraction. More often than not, the objects that create biological functions have no straightforward and "mechanical" coupling with them, they are only their mediator, their symbol. At the genome level, it is the relationship the genes have with each other, and with the signals that control them, that gives life to an organism. And within every cell, something is passed on from generation to generation, transmitting what common sense calls information, by a process which current models of heredity compare to the running of a program, in a sense that is close to the way this word is used in computer sciences. In brief, one can consider cells as Turing machines. This creates a paradox, however, as noticed by John von Neumann in the early sixties: a Turing machine does not make Turing machines. How is this paradox resolved? Where is the operating system, and what does the machine read? This will be the topic of our discussion.