Beginning with a new essay, "Levels of Life and Death," Tibor Ganti develops three general arguments about the nature of life. In "The Nature of the Living State," Professor Ganti answers Francis Crick's puzzles about "life itself," offering a set of reflections on the parameters of the problems to be solved in origins of life research and, more broadly, in the search for principles governing the living state in general. "The Principle of Life" describes in accessible language Ganti's chief insight about the organization of living systems-his theory of the "chemoton," or chemical automaton....