Research as Living argues that research is not merely an intellectual activity or institutional practice but a living system in the strict structural sense. The paper shows that research satisfies the core invariants of living systems: it metabolizes inputs (questions, anomalies, tools), maintains its own organization through autopoiesis (norms, methods, archives), evolves through variation and selection (conceptual mutations, methodological innovations, paradigm shifts), acts with distributed agency (preferences for coherence, generativity, and stability), and survives through relational networks (researchers, institutions, technologies, and environments).By treating research as a self‑maintaining, self‑transforming organism, the paper reframes scientific progress as adaptive expansion rather than linear accumulation. It provides a unified ontology for understanding how inquiry grows, stabilizes, reorganizes, and sometimes breaks down. This framework clarifies the metabolic, evolutionary, and relational pathologies that lead to stagnation or fragmentation, and it positions technologies—including AI—as co‑agents within research’s evolving ecology.The result is a substrate‑neutral account of inquiry that integrates philosophy of science, systems theory, and evolutionary dynamics. Research as Living serves as the organism‑level complement to the author’s operator suite, offering a structural foundation for future work on value, meaning, culture, and collective agency.