The Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) was founded by Heinz von Foerster in 1958 in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It closed in 1975, when von Foerster retired.
Work
The BCL’s name reflected its programme: understanding how biological systems compute, learn and organise themselves, and building machines inspired by them. Research ranged across self-organising systems, bionics, parallel computing, neural networks, perception, memory, and the logic of self-reference. The laboratory built early parallel processing machines, such as the Numa-Rete, a light-sensitive grid that counted objects in parallel.
People
W. Ross Ashby worked at the BCL in the 1960s, and Gordon Pask, Humberto Maturana, Lars Löfgren and Gotthard Günther were among the visitors and researchers. Students included Stuart Umpleby, Ricardo Uribe and Paul Weston. Von Foerster’s teaching there, including the student-led course “Cybernetics of Cybernetics” (1974), shaped second-order cybernetics.
Closure and legacy
The BCL depended on military research grants. After the Mansfield Amendment of 1969 restricted Department of Defense funding to research with direct military relevance, its funding dried up, and it closed on von Foerster’s retirement. Its archive and reports remain a major source for the history of cybernetics.
Further reading
- Albert Müller and Karl H. Müller (eds), An Unfinished Revolution? Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory (2007)
Mentioned in
- Article A Brief History of Cybernetics
- Article Cybernetics as a Discipline
- Person W. Ross Ashby
- Person Heinz von Foerster
- Person Gordon Pask
- Person Stuart Umpleby