While most of biology and medicine focus on the key roles genes and chemicals play in the formation and control of living systems, the spatial arrangement of the components that make up those systems and the physical forces they experience are being increasingly recognized as equally important. Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Founding Director of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, started investigating this “architecture of life” over thirty-five years ago, and discovered that Nature uses an architectural principle known as “tensegrity” (short for “tensional integrity”) to stabilize the shapes of living cells and to determine how they respond to mechanical forces.