What Sustains Life? An Overview -- The Pilgrimage: Highlights in Our Understanding of the Products and Components of Living Organisms -- Likelihood of Life’s Protein Machines: Extravagant in Construction Yet Efficient in Function -- Consilient Mechanisms for Diverse Protein-based Machines: The Efficient Comprehensive Hydrophobic Effect -- On the Evolution of Protein-based Machines (Toward Complexity of Structure and Diversity of Function) -- Biology Thrives Near a Movable Cusp of Insolubility -- Consilient Mechanisms for Protein-based machines of Biology -- Advanced Materials for the Future: Protein-based Materials with Potential to Sustain Individual Health and Societal Development -- Epilogue.

What Sustains Life? How can something so seemingly improbable and fragile as life exist in such hardy and resilient forms? The question has inspired intrigue among curious humans, from physicists to theologians, for centuries. Fascinated by this question, Dr Dan W. Urry, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota, St Paul, begins his investigation into the sustenance of life through an examination of the fundamental design of elastic-contractile model proteins. What does an understanding of these mechanisms lend to the comprehension of life itself? Encapsulating three decades of Dr. Urry’s collaborative research and analysis, his initial investigation into the basis of life expands include an increasingly complex and diverse story that is part science, part personal memoir and wholly fascinating.