Sophia Roosth is Associate Professor in Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science. In her Academy project, “The Quick and the Dead,” she asks: At what pace must life proceed in order to count as life? How do qualities such as speed, slowness, time, and temperature actually shape the ways in which we think about life as form, pattern, or process? What is the place of latency in the life sciences and allied disciplines? Roosth interrogates these questions by attending to a variety of scientific communities, among them geobiologists, micropaleontologists, polar scientists, and resurrection scientists.