Giorgio Prodi was a distinguished oncologist, poet, novelist and philosopher whose lifetime interest in understanding the connection between biology and epistemology Thomas A. Sebeok would repeatedly invoke as constituting, along with the work of Jakob von Uexküll and Heini Hediger, one of the three main precursor "iterations' of biosemiotics as a research agenda in the 20th century. Sebeok reports that prior to their first meeting in the mid-1970s, "Prodi had forged, without explicit reference to any other previous or contemporary thinker, still another variant of this sprouting, or re-emerging domain" to which he had given the title "natural semiotics' (1998: 292).