Word of the day - equipoise - and poetry in unexpected places

I've been reading scientific journals again, and have been finding a lot of poetry (strangely). Today's find includes my word of the day - equipoise. Here are the first two definitions from wikipedia (which I love):

Equipoise is the state of being balanced or in equilibrium, usually connoting something that is a product of counterbalancing.

Equipoise is also a poetic term.

The phrase I found today's word of the day in was here (Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 6, 871-880 (November 2007)):

Thus endowed with remarkable regulation and an extraordinary versatility, the cell may respond decisively or maintain its equipoise as appropriate, filtering out signalling noise, resisting harmful assaults and orchestrating specific and coordinated responses. In this way, a strange harmony of contrasts is born from the union of two pivotal paradoxes — a simple complexity that enables the cell to exhibit a sensitive robustness.

It is pretty amazing the way the cell can exist in a complex and changing environment, and pick out the most relevant pieces of that environment to respond to. I think the "simple complexity" refers to the limited repertoire of biochemical mechanisms through which signals are relayed to the interior of the cell (the simple part) but the complexity refers to the actual architecture and wiring by which these simple mechanisms are connected - in ways that seem to me to be much more complex (possibly because of the way they originate) than man-made electrical engineering designs. And the "sensitive robustness" refers to the way the cell can respond the same way, repeatedly, to signal, even if the internal wiring is damaged, or suffering from other perturbations.

My reading from two days ago also had a pretty excellent passage (from The EMBO Journal (2007) 26, 4555–4565, Published online 11 October 2007):

These discoveries highlight unexpected flexibility in the genetic code, but do not elucidate how the organisms survived the proteome chaos generated by codon identity redefinition.

I like the idea of "proteome chaos" - it sounds so dramatic! - and "codon identity redefinition" - it sounds like gender reassignment, or something like that.