Can Someone Explain this Quotation?

 
The latest issue of SEED magazine has a quotation from Sir Paul Nurse, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology & Medicine in 2001 for his work on the cell cycle in yeast. Here's the quotation ...

The complexity of living organisms means that the explanations toward which we endeavor may be non-intuitive. The infrastructure may often not be reducible to simple linear pathways of causal events. More likely, they will form interweaving networks with elements of feedback and feedforward, negative and positive loops, redundant steps, and storage devices that operate on many levels simultaneously. Unlike man-made machines, the architecture of the information will change in time and space to generate the richness of emergent behaviors that distinguish the chemistry of living systems from those of non-living ones.

Biology may therefore have to become "more strange" if it is to succeed in describing life. To accomplish this, we will need the assistance of those whose discipline underwent its own transformation to become more strange in the early 2oth century, the physical scientists.

Sounds a bit like vitalism, don't you think? Is he saying that cells don't obey the known laws of physics and chemistry?

Does this mean that those of us who are biochemists and molecular biologists won't be able to figure out how life works unless we call for help from chemists and physicists? What's the evidence for that?

Does he mean that our fundamental understanding of biochemistry is flawed and we need a whole new way of thinking similar to the quantum mechanics revolution in physics? If so, what exactly are those strange things that demand a new way of thinking? I don't see them.

Yes, biology is complicated. Nobody said it was going to be easy. But as far as I can see it's only complicated because of multiple layers of complexity each of which can be fairly simple and each of which obeys the laws of physics and chemistry. There's nothing "strange" going on that I can see. Am I missing something?

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[Photo Credit: Eighth annual Women & Science Lecture and Luncheon
at The Rockefeller University]