Decoding the Origami That Drives All Life

Robert Lang is a master of origami, known for his elegant and almost impossibly accurate sculptures. On his website, you can find his “crease patterns”—all the folds that go into his compositions, drawn out on flat sheets of paper. The patterns are beautiful in their own right, not least because it is almost impossible to look at one and divine what it will eventually become. How could you ever guess that this would become a beetle, or that this folds into a rhino, or that this is a tarantula-in-the-making?

That challenge, incidentally, is exactly what many scientists have struggled with for decades, because life—all life—depends on origami.

Specifically, —essential molecular machines, which do all the critical jobs that keep us alive. They’re built according to instructions encoded in our genes, which are used