The changing geography of what it is to be human

What it means to be human is the key question that philosophers, writers, theologians and artists have struggled with through the ages. Beneath it lie the problematic questions what is life and what is the boundary between life and non-life. In 1943 Erwin Schr dinger posed the profoundly interesting boundary question ‘How can the events in space and time that take place within the boundaries of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?’ Since then the question of where the boundaries of what it is to be human can be found has come to be answered primarily in terms of the genetic code and narratives based in molecular biology.