People around the world mourn the death of Professor Pier Luigi Luisi (1938-2025). He had an incredibly positive effect on my life and career, as well as that of countless others. He was a brilliant scientist and professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, also known as the ETH Zurich, for more than 30 years. Perhaps his greatest skill was being able to bring together so many wonderful people who established lifelong friendships. The research done by Professor Luisi and the many people whose lives he touched was recognized worldwide as pioneering in the field of chemical autopoiesis and minimal cell systems.

He was born on May 23, 1938, in Piombino, Tuscany, Italy. He spent most of his childhood on the island of Elba. He studied in Pisa and graduated in chemistry cum laude from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 1963. Part of his research was done at the University of Saint Petersburg (Russia) in the group led by Professor Mikhail V. Volkenstein. He continued working at the Scuola Normale until 1967. Next, he had postdoctoral fellowships in the group led by Professor S. Claesson at the University of Uppsala (Sweden) and the Macromolecular Center in Strasbourg (France), and in the group led by Professor Sidney A. Bernhard at the University of Oregon in Eugene (USA). That is where he met a graduate student named Ron MacQuarrie. Ron graduated with a PhD and then became a professor at the University of Missouri – Kansas City, where I was his student. As I was finishing my PhD, I told Ron that I wanted to do a postdoctoral fellowship in Europe. So, he introduced me to Professor Luisi, who had become a Professor at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. So, I received a postdoctoral fellowship and worked in his lab from 1979 to 1980. I did research on enzyme activity in water and oil emulsions, also called reverse micelles.

While at the ETH, I met many wonderful people, some of whom became lifelong friends. This includes Peter Walde and Karel Zeman, as well as Professor Luisi. Moreover, I loved the peaceful Swiss society and the variety of languages spoken there. I flourished in the multidisciplinary system at the ETH. This launched my career and led to much success later.

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I followed Professor Luisi’s work as he branched out into many areas and built a vast network of collaborators and friends. His writings about the origins and definitions of life, autopoiesis, and spirituality taught me much. He learned from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and the Santiago school in Chile1. They wanted to address the questions “What is life and what is cognition?”. This work led to a description of autopoiesis. They wrote: “Living systems transform inside themselves matter, in such a way that the product is their own organization. When you regard a living system, you always find a network of processes or molecules that interact in such a way as to produce the very network that produced them and that determines its boundary. Such a network I call autopoietic.” 2-3

Autopoiesis is the ability of living systems to break down and remake themselves while maintaining their self-organization. Cells and all living organisms are systems that produce their own components at the expense of nutrients and energy obtained from the environment 4. This uses systems thinking, also known as systems science5-6. Francisco Varela introduced Professor Luisi to Fritjof Capra, who wrote several books on systems science and the wholeness of life. Systems science emphasizes that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The brain is only a separate organ in the imagination of reductionist thinkers. They might try to study how the brain controls the human body – as if they were separate. They are not. The thing that we call the brain is part of a widespread network. It is part of the neuroendocrine immune system. The enteric nervous system in the gut contains as many neurons as the brain inside our skull. It is influenced by the composition of the bacteria in our gut – the gut microbiome. Moreover, at least 99% of our protein-coding genes are in the bacteria and viruses in our body. So, the human body is a complex mixture of viruses, bacteria, and human cells that interact in many ways.

When I was at the ETH, Professor Luisi was skeptical of the emphasis that was given by most biochemists to the role of DNA and genetics in controlling the human body. The human genome was thought to be the blueprint of life. It contained all the instructions needed to make a human being. There was also something called the central dogma of biochemistry – DNA codes for RNA, which codes for proteins. That is, information flows from DNA to RNA and not from RNA to DNA.

We now know that this is wrong. Instead, systems science taught us that DNA is not causally or epistemologically privileged. The DNA in the genetic code, as well as the RNA and proteins, can be modified by an extra layer of control called epigenetics7. That is, functional groups like methyl, sugars. and phosphate can be attached to proteins, altering their function. Proteins can bind to parts of the genome and control whether and when a gene is transcribed. So, Professor Luisi (and many others) were right – DNA is not a blueprint, and we are not hard-wired like an electric circuit in a machine. We are not machines. We make ourselves. Our bodies and cellular functions are influenced by a complex network of interacting systems operating in a vast array of rhythms.

Moreover, Professor Luisi used systems thinking when he worked with other people. He encouraged us to express our ideas – even if they turned out to be wrong. He encouraged critical thinking and valued everyone’s opinion. He also insisted that people get proper credit for their work. He listened to us, and we listened to him. Sometimes, the roles of teacher and student were reversed. He was always open to learning from his students. Of course, we were very happy to learn from him.

Several years after I left the ETH, Fritjof Capra and Professor Luisi met and began collaborating. Fritjof Capra wrote books that enlightened many people, including me. He wrote about hidden connections 8. That is, not all connections in the web of life are direct or easily identified. Their collaboration continued for many years. They wrote a best-selling book, The Systems View of Life 9. It has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and Russian.

In 2003, he retired from the ETH in Zurich. He continued his research at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, in Rome, and initiated 2018 the foundation of the Cortona Friends association after the ETH-supported Cortona week he founded in 1985 was discontinued in 2017.

Professor Luisi’s group did research in different areas. They explored giant phospholipid vesicles, microemulsion gels, and small liposomes that are useful as drug delivery systems. They also did research on designing proteins that do not exist in nature – the so-called “never born proteins”10-12. This led to further research by countless others. Although not directly involved in the development of lipid nanoparticles, research in the field of liposomes in various laboratories resulted in the development of mRNA lipid nanoparticles as vaccines for COVID-19 13.

Professor Luisi’s research on never-born proteins produced many results and helped lead to developments in designing new peptides and proteins with programmable functions. 14. He also wrote two books about the emergence of life 14-15.

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Professor Luisi was also a spiritual man who believed in the wholeness of life. He was part of the Mind and Life Institute, where he met the Dalai Lama and Brother David Steindl-Rast. He was the founder and spiritual leader of Cortona week and Cortona friends 16-18. This is a one-week meeting that started in Cortona, Italy. It was primarily for ETH PhD students and young researchers. Even though they were able to become excellent specialists in science and technology, this was not enough. To address the problems and opportunities in this complex world, people need to become more diverse. We need to learn many disciplines and recognize our spirituality and that of this sacred biosphere on which we live – called Gaia or Mother Earth.

Professor Luisi invited me to speak at Cortona week in 2018, shortly after my wife died. There I met many wonderful people, including Brother David Steindl-Rast and Antonio Vergara Meersohn. At breakfast on the first morning of Todi 2018, Brother David stood next to me because he felt much peace in me. I fought back the tears because I felt no such peace. My beloved wife had died just seven weeks earlier after a long struggle with kidney disease. Brother David and so many others (including my dear friends and spiritual sisters, Hortense Reintjens-Anwari and Irene Reintjens) helped me find peace and begin the road to recovery from my grief.

So, it is appropriate for me to end this with a blessing from Brother David:

Source of all blessings, you bless us with memory – that shared ingathering of the past into the present that allows us to recognize faces, learn poems by heart, find our way back when we are lost, and bring forth old and new from its almost inexhaustible store. May I know what to forgive and forget and what to retain and treasure, keeping in mind the smallest kindness shown to me and spreading its ripples for a long time19.

Acknowledgement: I want to thank members of the former Luisi group at ETH and of the Cortona Friends Association for their comments, advice, and many photos.

Visit Pier Luigi Luigi's profile on Meer.

Notes

1 Luisi, P.L. The Santiago school. Autopoiesis and the biologics of life on Meer.
2 Maturana H. and Varela F. De Máquinas y Seres Vivos, Autopiesis: La Organización de lo vivo..
3 Maturana H. and Varela F. Autopoiesis and Cognition.
4 Luisi, P.L. Systems thinking and its implications. The principle of interdependence on Meer.
5 Luisi, P.L. The Cortona-week experiment. The question of transdisciplinarity between science and humanities on Meer.
6 Luisi, P.L. Reductionism in Biology. Reversing the Bottom-up Approach to the Origin of Cellular Life on Meer. 7 Jalilian, Z. Epigenetic reprogramming in cancer: diagnosis and treatment. Exploring the impact of epigenetic alterations on cancer progression and therapeutic strategies on Meer.
8 Capra, F. The Hidden Connections. A Science for Sustainable Living.
9 Capra, F. & Luigi, P.L. The Systems View of Life.
10 Luisi, P.L. & Walde, P. Giant Vesicles Perspectives in Supramolecular Chemistry.
11 Luisi, P.L. The never born proteins on Meer.
12 Luisi, P.L. The Emergence of Life.
13 Luisi, P.L. The Emergence of Life.
14 Walde, Peter, and Sosaku Ichikawa. Lipid vesicles and other polymolecular aggregates—from basic studies of polar lipids to innovative applications on Applied Sciences.
15 Kortemme, Tanja. De novo protein design - from new structures to programmable functions on Cell.
16 Cortona Friends, In the spirit of the Cortona-week. Keeping the flame alive.
17 Cortona Friends, Brother David Steindl-Rast.
18 Luisi, P.L. & Houshmand, Z. Mind and Life: Discussions with the Dalai Lama on the Nature of Reality.
19 Brother David Steindl-Rast, 99 Blessings, an Invitation to Life.