The inspiration referenced in Donald Cram’s Nobel Prize lecture results from a sense of awe at the intricate control and complex design reflected in cellular genetics and metabolism. An understanding of metabolism is requisite to prediction of the exchange of many trace gases between organisms and the atmosphere. Metabolism has evolved as a complex web of intersecting biochemical pathways. Control over the flux of metabolites through these pathways requires that they be channeled in the proper direction, partitioned to alternative reactions at pathway intersections, and processed at the proper rate. Metabolic complexity includes network integration, adaptable control, and feedback, which in turn produce non-linear dependencies in the coupling of flux to the cellular environment. In recent decades a new framework, called systems biology, has emerged from the fields of metabolic biology and biochemistry to provide new approaches to describing the quantitative complexity of metabolic networks. Systems biology borrows heavily from concepts in the fields of engineering and mathematics, especially those involved with control theory and network integration. New fields of inquiry have emerged from systems biology, carrying names like genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and fluxomics (Sweetlove and Fernie 2005, Steuer 2007).