Sara,
I read your essay quite a while ago. I found myself not able at first to respond particularly, because I have pondered much the same issue. My undergraduate specialization with physics was biophysics, and correspondingly I had biochemistry and molecular biology. I cloned genes and the whole thing. My doctoral work was with quantum fields and gravity though. This matter to me is huge open question, and frankly I have not the foggiest idea whether there something we might call the bio-state in the physical universe.
My sense of this issue is that it involves some extensive variables with a phase change. Extensive variables are not scale invariant. For instance pressure does not depend on scale, while the number of atoms or particles is dependent. In addition, if there is a bio-state it is not a phase of a system that exists in closed thermodynamics. It must necessarily be a property or phase that exists in open thermodynamic systems. These systems are similar to Prigogine's work. Further, a variable of importance is information. Information in biological systems has some parallels with algorithmic complexity. For instance the DNA --- > mRNA --- > polypeptide is a sort of Turing machine process. In fact the production of a polypeptide by reading the RNA is a sort of Chomsky lexical system. The polypeptide might then be a switching system, say a kinase that phosphorylates another polypeptide, which starts another process, which ... .
The complexity is that while maybe some local aspects of molecular biology are similar to information processing systems, these are all open and linked into huge webs of biochemical pathways. As such there is an extensive property to this information or complexity. Whether this can in some ways lead to a physical state or phase, the bio-state, is something that I think we have no idea about. It might be the case, and there is certainly a qualitative sense there is such a state, but as yet we have no theory or data.
Cheers LC