A broader view of condensates

We should never underestimate the ingenuity with which biology uses molecules to get stuff done. When the Nobel laureate François Jacob wrote in 1970 that ‘the aim of modern biology is to interpret the properties of the organism by the structure of its constituent molecules’, he was articulating the programme that had existed ever since it became clear in the 1950s how those structures could be encoded in the genome sequence. What this amounted to was privileging a certain length scale in the biological hierarchy: that of the molecule and its spatial arrangement of atoms. In this view, everything followed from that structure.