In information thermodynamics, Léon Brillouin (1889-1969) was a French-born American physicist noted for his 1956 book Science and Information Theory in which, building on the work of American electrical engineer Claude Shannon, who he worked with at IBM as director of electronics education (1948-53), he uses a hodgepodge of mathematical derivation to make connections between thermodynamics and information, thus introducing the term negentropy. [1]

Life principle
As early as 1949, seeded by Erwin Schrodinger's 1944 What is Life?, Brillouin was search for a supposed “life principle” to be active in living structures as a sort of remedy against the second law. His entire argument, as is the case in these sorts of grasps at historical vitalism, seems to have been rather nonsensical. Brillouin’s basic argument is that a living organism has special properties, namely: resist destruction and healing ability, which do not appear in inert matter, hence we must accept a life principle that allows for such exceptions to the second law. He states: [2]

“When life ceases and death occurs, the ‘life principle’ stops working, and the second principle regains its full power, implying demolition of the living structure.”

The basic problem here is that nowhere in German physicist Rudolf Clausius’ mechanical theory of heat (thermodynamics) is there any supposition that the second law implies demolition of living structure.

References
1. (a) Brillouin, Léon. (1956). Science and Information Theory. New York: Academic Press.
(b) Mayumi, Kozo. (2001). The Origins of Ecological Economics: The Bioeconomics of Georgescu-Reogen (ch. 3: section 4: “The Alleged equivalence between information and negative entropy, pgs. 39-44). Routledge.
2. Brillouin, Leon. (1949). “Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics”, American Scientist, Vol. 37, pgs. 554-68.

External links
● Leon Brillouin – Wikipedia.