Are Physicists the Inspiration for Artificial Life?

Today in the science section of the NYT you can read:

"The harmless nucleic interjections include encrypted versions of the researchers’ names and three apt if self-conscious quotations: “See things not as they are, but as they might be,” from a biography of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer; “What I cannot build, I cannot understand,” by Richard Feynman; and “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to recreate life out of life,” by James Joyce, which, when taken together with the fact that the physicist Murray Gell-Mann named the fundamental particles of the atomic nucleus “quarks” after a line in Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake,” suggests that scientists are at least as fond of the nougaty Irish novelist as is the average English major."

Oppenheimer, Feynman, Gell-Mann: Here in Memory and Respect, Artificial Life is Coming.

I would've put some lines from Erwin Schrodinger's "What is Life?"