ABSTRACT
This essay outlines the creation of the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois under the vision and direction of Heinz von Foerster. It also considers the work at that lab in relation to two significant scientific movements in the 1960s, the Self-Organizing Systems movement, and the Bionics movement. The essay will consider the history and goals of these broad movements. More specifically, it considers several of the machines built at the BCL under the guidance of von Foerster, including the Numa-Rete, Dynamic Signal Analyzer, and Adaptive Reorganizing Automata, and how these machines constituted intellectual contributions to these new fields. The relation of these machines to these movements was highly significant, especially insofar as these devices could not be easily construed as contributions to more traditional science and engineering sub-disciplines. The paper argues that von Foerster's contributions to biological computation lay as much in his ability to help forge entire new disciplines as it did in contributing theories and technologies to those disciplines. It concludes that von Foerster's approach contributed to a new kind of design methodology that was far more conceptually-driven than most traditional engineering methodologies.