Alan Kay speaks about this in his 1997 OOPSLA keynote at about this point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYT2se94eU0&t=1960s

sophomore level biology was the first official mention of how misrepresentative most depictions are. decried as cartoons, and void biased suggestions of a particular aspect of function.

it was really expressed best as statistical examination of contacts and degrees of freedom.

this provides a good prompt for appreciation of cellular events at intermolecular scale.

generally, the physics, and physical chemistry of colloids, and colloidal systems are basic to such pursuit.