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The Architecture of Life A universal set of building rules seems to guide the design of organic structures — from simple carbon compounds to complex cells and tissues

organism, whether it is a bacterium or a baboon, develops through an incredibly complex series of interactions involving a vast number of different components. These components, or subsystems, are themselves made up of smaller molecular components, which independently exhibit their own dynamic behavior, such as the ability to catalyze chemical reactions. Yet when they are combined into some larger functioning unit—such as a cell or tissue—utterly new and unpredictable properties emerge, including the ability to move, to change shape and to grow. Although researchers have recognized this intriguing fact for some time, most discount it in their quest to explain life’s fundamentals. For the past several decades, biologists have attempted to advance our understanding of how the human body works by defining the properties of life’s critical materials and molecules, such as DNA, the stuff of genes. Indeed, biologists are now striving to identify every gene in the complete set, known as the genome, that every human being carries. Because genes are the “blueprints” for the key molecules of life, such as proteins, this Holy Grail of molecular biology will lead in the near future to a catalogue of essentially all the molecules from which a human is created. Understanding what the parts of a complex machine are made of, however, does little to explain how the whole system works, regardless of whether the complex system is a combustion engine or a cell. In other words, identifying and describing the molecular puzzle pieces will do little if we do not understand the rules for their assembly. That nature applies common assembly rules is implied by the recurrence—at scales from the molecular to the macroscopic—of certain patterns, such as spirals, pentagons and triangulated forms. These patterns appear in structures ranging from highly regular crystals to relatively irregular proteins and in organisms as diverse as viruses, plankton and humans. After all, both organic and inorganic matter are made of the same building blocks: atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus. The only difference is how the atoms are arranged in three-dimensional space. This phenomenon, in which components join together to form larger, stable structures having new properties that could not have been predicted from the characteristics of their individual parts, is known as self-assembly. It is observed at many scales in nature. In the human body, for example, large molecules self-assemble into cellular components known as organelles, which self-assemble into cells, which self-assemble into tissues, which self-assemble into organs. The result is a body organized hierarchically as tiers of systems within systems. Thus, if we are to understand fully the way living creatures form and function, we need to uncover these basic principles that guide biological organization. Despite centuries of study, researchers still know relatively little about the forces that guide atoms to self-assemble into molecules. They know even less about how groups of molecules join together to create living cells and tissues. Over the past two decades, however, I have discovered and explored an intriguing and seemingly fundamental aspect of self-assembly. An astoundingly wide variety of natural systems, including carbon atoms, water molecules, proteins, viruses, cells, tissues and even humans and other living creatures, are constructed using a common form of architecture known as tensegrity. The term refers to a system that stabilizes itself mechanically because of the way in which tensional and The Architecture of Life