What is life? I'm still not exactly sure after this morning's panel on the subject, but I'm confident that some of the best minds today are trying mightily to figure that out.

TED's Chris Anderson gave Craig Venter more than his 18-minutes of fame on the stage this morning, due to the gravity of his message. Venter, who sequenced the human genome more than a decade ago, is hoping to make his legacy even bigger. His quest this time is to create the first synthetic lifeforms, and the implications of this project could be potentially greater than anything we've ever seen.

(More on Venter later, after an exclusive Q&A with Venter at a Portfolio sponsored lunch.)

The next two speakers were also related to science, and what it may help us know in the future: specifically, DNA origami and memes. (Do with that what you will!)

While we wait for science to someday give us the answer to this perplexing question about life, we thankfully have the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to tell us what it means today.

At first, I was confused by her inclusion in this panel, but by the end of her talk I knew she had it all figured out. Life is about work, love, and play, in equal doses. She used her research on Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson to portray how neglecting just one of the three ingredients in the recipe of life can leave you less whole.

Goodwin is an entertaining storyteller, and she learned from the best: Johnson himself. She came to work for him after dancing with him at an event for White House fellows (she was one of three women there, and the famously charming Johnson took note). He whispered in her ear that he wanted her to come work for him.

Two days later, Goodwin had an anti-Vietnam article published in The New Republic that discussed how to remove Johnson from office. Johnson stuck with his gut on Goodwin, saying if he could win her over after a year he could win just about anyone.

Goodwin developed a bit of a crush on Johnson herself, and she was captivated by his storytelling abilities. It turns out that most of them were tall tales, but that only made them all that much better.

She ended with a touching story of the role of "play" in her own life: her passion for baseball. A childhood fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, she's now a Red Sox fan.

While plenty of TEDsters in the audience were able to relate to that, no one was quite sure if being a Red Sox fan constitutes work, love, or play.

By Megan Barnett