George Whitesides, Reverse engineering biology

So the problem that we're going to talk about is this one. We know, I know, how to convert chicken into chicken soup. I do not know how to convert chicken soup into chicken. And so how does that happen? And here's the second part of the problem. And that is that you look at milk pouring into a cup, and this makes perfectly good sense. If I reverse it, it really makes you nervous, or it should make you nervous. One of the very few things that I know for sure is the second law of thermodynamics. And this is sort of what happened. How did it happen? Well, obviously, it doesn't violate the second law. We know that. But what does happen? And so there are sort of two views of life. We've heard a lot of this view that exponential growth in which information is coded in DNA and so on. It's all terrific. There's another view, which is if you look inside the box, you see this stuff.