Thanks to fascinating models of understanding and impressive research results that increasingly impact everyday life and future security, the biosciences have been proclaimed the sciences of life par excellence. The riddle of life now seemed decipherable: as a computable and ultimately calculable chain, as a code. However, in the traditional humanities, there is a growing realization that the human body can no longer be explored solely from a motif-historical perspective and left to medical and natural scientific research as mere "nature." Instead, new forms of inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration are urgently needed. The Potsdam Romance scholar Ottmar Ette questions and analyzes the concept of life knowledge in science and literature, as well as in various constructs and discourse formations.