The Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) was a research institute of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It was founded on 1 January 1958, by then Professor of Electrical Engineering Heinz von Foerster. He was head of BCL until his retirement in 1975.
The focus of research at BCL was systems theory and specifically the area of
self-organizing systems
Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when suff ...
,
bionics
Bionics or biologically inspired engineering is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology.
The word ''bionic'', coined by Jack E. Steele in August 1 ...
, and
bio-inspired computing
Bio-inspired computing, short for biologically inspired computing, is a field of study which seeks to solve computer science problems using models of biology. It relates to connectionism, social behavior, and emergence. Within computer science, b ...
; that is, analyzing, formalizing, and implementing biological processes using computers. BCL was inspired by the ideas of Warren McCulloch and the Macy Conferences, as well as many other thinkers in the field of
cybernetics
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson m ...
.
In the first decade of its existence, BCL was primarily a non-teaching research lab. Although students could work at BCL, they were not trained.
Until 1965, many researchers had a visiting professorship at BCL: W. William Ainsworth (England),
Alex Andrew
Alex is a given name. It can refer to a shortened version of Alexander, Alexandra, Alexis.
People
Multiple
*Alex Brown (disambiguation), multiple people
*Alex Gordon (disambiguation), multiple people
*Alex Harris (disambiguation), multiple peop ...
(England),
W. Ross Ashby
W. Ross Ashby (6 September 1903 – 15 November 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not ...
Ernst von Glasersfeld
Ernst von Glasersfeld (March 8, 1917, Munich – November 12, 2010, Leverett, Franklin County, Massachusetts) was a philosopher, and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, research associate at the Scientific Reasonin ...
John C. Lilly
John Cunningham Lilly (January 6, 1915 – September 30, 2001)John C. Lilly at
(USA). Ashby (since 1961) and Günther (since 1967) received regular professorships, and Löfgren and Pask remained in constant contact with BCL even after their visiting professorship.
BCL was financed primarily by grants. This came in part from military organizations such as U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy which, in the 1950s and 60s, possessed large budgets for basic research. Non-military donors included the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in New York,
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research.
NASA was established in 1958, succeeding th ...
, Electronics Research Center, Boston, Massachusetts Office of Education, Bureau of Research, Washington, DC and the Point Foundation in San Francisco, California. With the beginning of the 1970s, military research funding became limited to projects that provided militarily useful results, and von Foerster was unable to identify adequate sponsors. In 1974, the BCL was closed due to lack of research funds.
Sources
* Albert Mueller, A brief history of the BCL. In: ''Austrian Journal of History''. 11 (1), 2000, pp. 9–30.
* Bernard Scott, Heinz von Foerster obituary, ''The Independent'', 25 October 2002.
* Heinz von Foerster, ''Understanding systems: Conversations on epistemology and ethics'', Springer, 2002.
Books
Albert Muller, Karl Muller (eds), ''An Unfinished Revolution?: Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory / BCL 1958–1976'', Edition Echoraum, 2007.