The other word missing is "cheap". Proteins are under a massive selection pressure: many thermodynamic reactions in fundamental bits of biology are as thermodynamically efficient as they can be, else some slightly more efficient mutant would have out-competed it aeons ago.

I became interested in biology as a physicist when I realised that all of the problems, on some level, boil down to putting a load of lego pieces in a box, shaking it up with some energy not terribly different to k_B T, and getting a fully-formed, self-replicating lego models out the other end. It's all physics. It's all utterly incomprehensibly mind-bogglingly complex with layers of complexity wrapped around each other, and far out of the realms of either physics or chemistry to compute completely. It's why I work at the intersection of the two fields.

Another famous paper, often-mentioned, related to this is "How a biologist would fix a transistor radio", essentially armed only with a shotgun. The tools of modern molecular biology may be scalpels rather than shotguns, but still, the idea is arguably the same.

> It's why I work at the intersection of the two fields.

Sounds fascinating. May I ask which field that is/what type of work you do?

Associate professor of medical physics & molecular imaging

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