About the book: 2024 / Biophysicist Raghuveer Parthasarathy explains how four physical principles - self-assembly, regulatory circuits, predictable randomness and scaling - determine the structure and the behavior of biological systems, from the folding of protein molecules and gene activity to the fate of bacteria in the intestinal community. These patterns underlie the entire diversity of living nature and make it possible to develop previously unimaginable biotechnologies. The author examines the operation of physical rules using a variety of examples, including packaging of viral DNA, membrane structure, laying out the body plan in embryogenesis, organs on a chip, genome editing, prion diseases and cystic fibrosis..