This need for integration among disciplines and research areas is antagonistic to excessive specialization and compartmentalization, allowing astrobiology to be qualified as a truly transdisciplinary enterprise. Insulated expertise cannot grasp the vastness of the astrobiological issues. Given the intrinsic complexity of the astrobiological studies, with its multifactorial evidences and theoretical/experimental approaches, multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives are mandatory. The rise of astrobiological studies is explicitly based on a transdisciplinary approach that reminds of the Copernican Revolution, which eroded the basis of a closed Aristotelian worldview and reinforced the notion that the frontiers between disciplines are artificial. The establishment of cosmology as a science provides a parallel to the building-up of the scientific status of astrobiology. Tensions within theexobiology research community and betweenNASA-funded science and the academic researchcommunity are explored, as are such milestonesof discipline formation as journals andprofessional societies. The presence of a handful of prominent seniorscientists such as Joshua Lederberg, MelvinCalvin and Norman Horowitz helped gaincredibility for exobiology, in the face ofcriticism and competition from existing lifesciences disciplines. NASA played avery important role in catalyzing the rapidconsolidation of exobiology, both throughresearch grants and through sponsored meetingsthat overcame disciplinary boundaries, bringingtogether scientists from diverse backgrounds. The fieldwas inherently highly interdisciplinary, yet itcoalesced very quickly and was responsible inits first twenty years for numerous importantcontributions to twentieth century life scienceand planetary sciences such as climatology, thestudy of mass extinctions, etc. The new discipline of exobiology formed fromthe intertwining of origin of life researchwith the search for life or its building blockson other planets, from 1957–1973.
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