 Ingber's early scientific work led to the discovery that tensegrity architecture - first described by the architect Buckminster Fuller and the sculptor Kenneth Snelson - is a fundamental design principle that governs how living systems are structured, from individual molecules and cells to whole tissues, organs and organisms.Ingber's work on tensegrity led him to propose that mechanical forces play as important a role in biological control as chemicals and genes do, and to investigate the molecular mechanism by which cells convert mechanical signals into changes in intracellular biochemistry and gene expression, a process known as "mechanotransduction.