biology sets lower bounds for what is possible I was surprised when I evaluated this to be a true statement. As a biologist I'm used to marveling at how optim

biology sets lower bounds for what is possible I was surprised when I evaluated this to be a true statement. As a biologist I'm used to marveling at how optimal everything seems in the natural world, and at how evolutionarily distant organisms converge on the same form given similarity between ecological niches. But take flight as an example: we can fly orders of magnitude faster than the fastest flying organism. The upper end of the biological case is the lower bound of what is possible. The early use of the biological example was to inform us that flight was possible at all. More directly related to the topic of the article, this New Yorker piece, on a new class of therapeutic compounds for correcting protein folding errors: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/04/090504fa_fact_groopman http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/04/090504fa_fact_...