Humberto Maturana

Humberto Augusto Gastón Maturana Romesín (Santiago, September 14, 1928-Ibid, May 6, 2021), known simply as Humberto Maturana, was a biologist, Chilean philosopher and writer, National Science Award in 1994.

He worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) between 1958 and 1960. Later, together with his student and later collaborator Francisco Varela, he developed his original concept of autopoiesis in his book De máquinas y seres vivos (1972), a concept that accounts for the (internal) organization of living systems as closed self-production networks of the components that constitute them. In addition, he laid the foundations of the "biology of knowledge", a discipline that is responsible for explaining the operation of living beings as closed systems and determined by their structure.

Another important aspect of his reflections corresponds to the invitation that Maturana made to change the question about «being» (a question that supposes the existence of an objective reality, independent of the observer) to the question about «doing» (question that takes as its starting point the objectivity between parentheses, that is, that the objects are "brought to hand" through the operations of distinction carried out by the observer, understood as any human being operating in language).

Biography

Maturana was raised by his mother, Olga Romesín, a social worker at a polyclinic in Santiago, Chile, who separated from her husband Alejandro Maturana when Humberto was one or two years old. He liked to remember that his mother taught him from a very young age to wash, cook and knit, tasks in those years considered for women. Maturana's interest in biology and the origin of living beings manifested itself in him from a very young age. At eleven years old, after his grandmother passed away, his mother stopped taking him and his brother Draco to mass, and taught them about the nuances between good and evil, as well as the non-existence of original sin. Around that same time, he accompanied his mother on a home visit to the Punta de Rieles neighborhood, in Macul, where he saw the extreme poverty suffered by a woman and a child younger than him. Since then he stopped believing in God.

The future scientist completed his secondary education at the Manuel de Salas High School. His childhood was lonely. His mother worked and his father was an absent figure. At the age of twelve he fell ill with pulmonary tuberculosis, which is why he spent three years at rest and another two years hospitalized. Maturana took advantage of this seclusion to read books such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, despite the fact that he had to rest and therefore was forbidden to read. The young Maturana, as a game and as a way of dealing with this serious illness, while he was hospitalized at the Hospital del Salvador for about a year, asked the doctors on the premises to no longer call him "Humberto", but rather "Irigoitia". Similarly, he was later hospitalized at the Putaendo Sanatorium where, inspired by Genesis , he asked to be called "Tubalcaín", after the biblical character descended from Cain. In this way, he thought, the patient was not him, but the characters he was creating.

Finally, he managed to save himself from tuberculosis, just when he began his medical studies, thanks to the arrival of streptomycin, the first antibiotic created to combat this disease.

Youth and higher education

In 1950 he entered the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile. Although he did not graduate, he was an assistant in the Biology course taught by Professor Gabriel Gasic. In 1954 he moved to University College London to study anatomy and neurophysiology, thanks to a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation. The following year, in London and at the age of twenty-seven, he had his first wife and wife, María Montañez (se they had married in Chile), the first of their three children: Marcelo Maturana Montañez, editor and writer. He lived with María, a medical student at the time and later a doctor-psychiatrist, for twenty years. The absence of a father in Humberto's childhood would have meant, according to him, "improvising" in his own role as his father, since he had to mediate with his demanding academic demands. As a consequence, according to what he would say later, he did not know how to be as present in the adolescence of his two children as – looking back – he would have wanted.

In 1958 he obtained a Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University, in the United States. That same year he began working as an associate researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he stayed until 1960, when he returned to Chile as a second assistant in the Biology course at the School of Medicine of the University of Chile.. Around this time, his second son was born, Alejandro Maturana Montañez, today an engineer.

Around 1978, he got together again, this time with Beatriz Genzsch, a reader of the I Ching and the tarot, with whom he would begin a long relationship of thirty-five years.

In 1999, Humberto Maturana had a third child, Vicente Maturana Gálvez, with psychologist Valeria Gálvez. Although she recognized Vicente (today an engineering student), she unfortunately did not want to have any kind of personal relationship with him, which led to criticism from within his family.

Professional Life

Maturana in June 2009, during her presentation “The Biological Theory of Knowledge” at the University of Antofagasta Extension Center

In 1958, Maturana first recorded the activity of a directional cell of a sensory organ, together with scientist Jerome Lettvin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, although they did not ultimately win the award.

Back in his country, since 1965 he has been a tenured professor in the Department of Biology of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Chile. From this ownership, during the 1970s, he would develop together with his assistant, Francisco Varela, the original concept of autopoiesis that Maturana had already had in mind some years before.

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In 1988, he was one of the founders of the political movement Independientes por el Consenso Democrático.

In 1990 he was designated Illustrious Son of the Ñuñoa commune (Santiago de Chile).^{[citation required]} In 1992, he was declared an honorary doctor of the Free University of Brussels. That same year, together with the biologist Jorge Mpodozis, he raised the idea of the evolution of species by means of natural drift, based on the neutralist conception that the way in which the members of a lineage carry out their autopoiesis is conserves transgenerationally in a particular ontogenic way of life or phenotype, which depends on its history of interactions, and whose innovation would lead to lineage diversification.

In 1994 he received the Chilean National Science Award for his research in the biological sciences, specifically in the visual perception of vertebrates and for his contributions to the theory of knowledge oriented towards education, communication and ecology.

In 1997 he met the family counselor Ximena Dávila, while Maturana was still teaching at the University of Chile. Ximena's idea that pain has a cultural origin caught the attention of the biologist. Thus, in the year 2000 both founded the Instituto de Formación Matríztica, dedicated, in their own words, to "accompanying people in the communities human beings and organizations in their processes of transformation and cultural integration".

In 2013, Beatriz Genzsch, who was his partner for thirty-five years, passed away. This loss was difficult for him to accept. The duel was spent on his plot of Lo Cañas; Later she would reside at the home of her friend and collaborator Ximena Dávila. Currently, a project is being developed to film a documentary about her life and work.

She passed away on May 6, 2021 at the age of ninety-two, due to respiratory complications from pneumonia.

Works

Maturana has published several dozen scientific articles, both alone and with other scientists or collaborators. His books and the work dedicated to the author are listed below.

Books

• 1972: Of machines and living beings: a theory of biological organization (with Francisco Varela)
• 1980: Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living (with Francisco Varela)
• 1984: The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Basis of Human Understanding (with Francisco Varela)
• 1990: Emotions and language in education and politics
• 1991: The meaning of the human (with Sima Nisis of Rezepka)
• 1992: Objectivity: an argument to force
• 1993: Love and game: forgotten foundations of the human from patriarchy to democracy (with Gerda Verden-Zöller)
• 1994: Democracy is a work of art
• 1995: From biology to psychology (with Jorge Luzoro García)
• 1995: Reality, Objective or Built? Vol. 1, Biological foundations of reality
• 1996: Reality, Objective or Built? Vol. 2, Biological Knowledge Basics
• 1997: A ontologia da realidade (with Cristina Magro, Miriam Graciano and Nelson Vaz)
• 1999: De l'origine des espèces par voie de la dérive naturelle
• 2000: Formação humano e capacitação (with Sima Nisis de Rezepka and Jaime Clasen)
• 2004: From being to doing: the origins of the biology of cognition (with Bernhard Pörksen)
• 2004: Amar é brincar: Esquecidos do humano do patriarchdo à Democracia (with Gerda Verden-Zöller, Humberto Mariotti and Lia Diskin)
• 2007: The origin of humanness in the biology of love (with Gerda Verden-Zöller and Pille Bunnell)
• 2008: Human in six biology-cultural trials (with Ximena Davila)
• 2015: The tree of living (with Ximena Davila)
• 2019: History of our daily life (with Ximena Davila)
• 2021: The Reflective Revolution (with Ximena Davila)

Books about Humberto Maturana

• 1980: Conversing with Maturana of Education (Miguel López Melero; reissued in 2003)
• 1992: Conversations with Humberto Maturana: Psychotherapist Questions to the Biologist (Kurt Ludewig Cornejo and Humberto Maturana)

Videos

• Maturana, H. R. The biology of cognition and language. 13 classes. University of California and American Philosophical Association. Extension Media Center. 1980.
• Maturana, H. R. The Maturana lectures. The Maturana dialogues. Eastern Virginia Family Therapy Institute. Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA. 06 conferences. 1984.
• Maturana, H. R. Workshop of Humberto Maturana R. São Paulo Family Therapy Institute. 03 conferences.

Filmography

Awards and recognitions

• 1990: illustrious son of the commune of Ñuñoa (Santiago de Chile)^{[chuckles]required]}
• 1992: Doctor honoris causa de la Universidad Libre de Brussels
• 1994: Chilean National Science Award
• McCulloch Award, awarded by the American Cybernetics Association
• 2009: Medalla Universidad de Santiago de Chile (Golden category) and doctor honoris causa University of Santiago de Chile