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Because it's far more than chemistry.

You need biology, obviously.

You need biochemistry.

You need to think, as I think network systems folk, you need to think about computation.

You need to think about information.

And that is not happening yet, except we are trying to bring this perspective forward.

But the more you understand how information systems work, once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

It's one of those things.

Yes, and chemistry can happen even if you strip some of the parts out.

You can get very minimal level of information processing that does not look anything like the translation that cells relies on, but chemists showed from linear... You can generate information that arrives to a processing center in the form of a linear polymer.

The informatic part of this system that I think sets it apart from computation and from metabolism comes in if you think about the information itself, right?

So we have four nucleotide letters that compose DNA, and they are processed in the translation in triplets.

So you have in triplet codon fragments.

So you have four times four times four.

So you have 64 possible states that can be encoded by four letters in three positions.

There is only one code that says start.

There's only one.

And then there's two, if not three, that says stop.

So that's what you work with.

But you can have 64 possible states, but life only uses 20.