Autopoiesis is just one of several current theories of life, including the chemoton[20] of Tibor Gánti, the hypercycle of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster,[21] [22] [23] the (M,R) systems[24][25] of Robert Rosen, and the autocatalytic sets[26] of Stuart Kauffman, similar to an earlier proposal by Freeman Dyson.[27] All of these (including autopoiesis) found their original inspiration in Erwin Schrödinger's book What is Life?[28] but at first they appear to have little in common with one another, largely because the authors did not communicate with one another, and none of them made any reference in their principal publications to any of the other theories.

In 1971 Gánti tackled the problem head-on in a new book, Az Élet Princípiuma, or The Principles of Life. Published only in Hungarian, this book contained the first version of his chemoton model, which described what he saw as the fundamental unit of life. However, this early model of the organism was incomplete, and it would take him another three years to publish what is now regarded as the definitive version—again only in Hungarian, in a paper that is not available online.

In 1966 he published a book on molecular biology called Forradalom az Élet Kutatásában, or Revolution in Life Research, a dominant university textbook for years—partly because few others were available. The book asked whether science understood how life was organized, and concluded that it did not.

That’s because he devised a model of the simplest possible living organism, which he called the chemoton, that points to an exciting explanation for how life on Earth began.