Varela, F.J. (1996). "The early days of autopoiesis"

Though this article is named after Heinz Von Foerster, he didn't feature much in it. It is mostly a history of Varela's early career in the context of autopoiesis. The word poiesis came from a colleagues book on Quixote. Varela is a biologist. He was at Harvard and was disatisfied. He apprenticed before that with Maturana. he went back to Chile because the environment was supportive.

Fernando Flores and Projecto Cinco. Left Chile because of political danger.

The first already big people to pick autopoiesis up were Ivan Illich, Erich Fromm, Flores and Stafford Beer.

The most interesting part of this article was his list of influential philosophy of science writers, Kuhn's immediate predecessors, mostly French. Alexandre Koyre ("above all"), Georges Canguilhem, Gaston Bachelard. And later, Kuhn.