Ever Heard of Bio­mimicry?

by Elio

Hu­man sub­tlety will never de­vise an in­ven­tion more beau­ti­ful, more sim­ple or more di­rect than does Na­ture, be­cause in her in­ven­tions, noth­ing is lack­ing and noth­ing is su­per­flu­ous.
—Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)

Foot of a Lep­i­do­dacty­lus gar­dineri Gecko show­ing ad­he­sive pads. Foto by Paddy Ryan

Re­cently I heard an ex­cit­ing talk by bi­ol­o­gist Dayna Bau­meister, the co-founder of the Bio­mimicry Guild. Biomi­micry, I found out, refers to the em­u­la­tion of technolo­gies used by liv­ing things for hu­man ap­pli­ca­tions. In their words: Bio­mimicry is the prac­tice of de­vel­op­ing sustain­able tech­nolo­gies in­spired by ideas from Na­ture. It does not mean du­pli­cat­ing these tech­nolo­gies, but rather to just har­vest the ideas. Ex­ist­ing ex­am­ples of what they mean are sticky sur­faces based on gecko feet and "green" build­ings in­spired by pas­sive cool­ing in ter­mite mounds. Many oth­ers can be found at their web site. What I found in­trigu­ing is that this mind­set rec­og­nizes that all liv­ing things have solved prob­lems of sur­vival via their own in­no­v­a­tive tech­no­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ments. Bio­mimicry par­al­lels, but is not the same as, those ap­proaches that copy na­ture, for ex­am­ple, nan­otech­nol­ogy and bio­me­chan­ics.

Ter­mites mound near The Cape, Queens­land AU. Source

Alas, bio­mi­crists have paid scant if any at­ten­tion to mi­crobes. I found this out when I asked a ques­tion af­ter Baumeister's talk. Isn't this an over­sight that needs re­medying? I am not think­ing so much of copy­ing the fla­gel­lar mo­tor to make nanomo­tors, but rather am ask­ing what do these struc­tures tell us about im­prov­ing all mo­tors, big and small? What do bac­te­r­ial nanowires tell us about con­duct­ing elec­tric­ity? What does the self-as­sem­bly of vi­ral and bac­te­r­ial or cel­lu­lar struc­tures say about con­struct­ing build­ings or bridges? And so on...