MC Weekly Issue #13, Tuesday, March 21, 2006

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

We will design evolution.

When Franklin, Crick, and Watson discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, the realm of the living was rendered as a system of information. Since then, we’ve grown in our capacity to explore every aspect of life as we know it - from biological systems and products to new forms of intervention in medicine and genetic engineering. As Alvin Toffler wrote in The Third Wave, “Second Wave thinkers conceived of the human species as the culmination of a long evolutionary process; Third Wave thinkers must now face the fact that we are about to become the designers of evolution.”

That being said, it will do us no good to put ourselves above nature. As the great biologist E.O. Wilson has said, “our species and its way of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.” As “designers of evolution” it behooves us to learn from its genius. I recently met Julian Vincent, professor of biomimetics at the University of Bath in the UK. Vincent, trained as an engineer, started his career with the intention of engineering nature but soon realized that engineering probably had more to learn from nature than the other way around.

Biomimetics, or biomimicry, the application of methods and systems found in nature to the fields of engineering and design, has its modern roots in the thought of Buckminster Fuller, but its importance is now gaining critical mass. One of the leaders in the field today is Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovations Inspired by Nature. Benyus argues that the nine basic principles of biomimicry are:

Nature runs on sunlight.
Nature uses only the energy it needs.
Nature fits form to function.
Nature recycles everything.
Nature rewards cooperation.
Nature banks on diversity.
Nature demands local expertise.
Nature curbs excesses from within.
Nature taps the power of limits.

Benyus is currently leading the Biomimicry Web Portal project, a sort of “Google of Nature”, whose purpose is to allow the genius of nature to inform the fields of design. An initial prototype of the portal can be seen at http://database.biomimicry.org/. The potential for this database is extraordinary and revolutionary.

An excellent overview of the biomimicry trend has been posted by Jeremy Faludi on the excellent worldchanging blog: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003680.html.

Needless to say, the ideas and practices of the biomimicry movement are a crucial component of the Massive Change project.

Interview with Janine Benyus

The following is an interview conducted for Massive Change Radio by Jennifer Leonard. It appears in the book Massive Change. The full interview can be accessed at here.

With our increased capacity and sophisticated scientific tools, do we have the opportunity to align ourselves more closely with nature than ever before?

More powerful micro- and macroscopes are allowing us to see the inner workings of a dragonfly’s wing, and to watch in color as a star is born. As biological knowledge doubles every few years, we have more information to inspire us - more evolved designs and strategies we can learn from. That’s a great trend pulling us toward new kinds of innovation. At the same time, our tools are feeding back disturbing news: the double-glazing of the earth, the toxins that we’re swimming in, the water shortages. As organisms, we’re feeling biologically vulnerable again, but in this case it’s not the saber tooth tiger that’s threatening our lives. It’s us. And that discomfort is providing the push toward innovation. We’re realizing that we need to use our scientific savvy to change the way we’ve been living our lives.

Materials scientist Mehmet Sarikaya has said, “We are on the brink of a materials revolution that will be on par with the Iron Age and the Industrial Revolution. We are leaping forward into a new age of materials. Within the next century I think biomimetics will significantly alter the way in which we live.” Describe his work in this context.

Mehmet studies a giant marine snail called abalone, whose mother-of-pearl interior, in addition to being incredibly beautiful and iridescent, is twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics, which we still make today by the heat, beat, and treat process. We heat kilns up to 4,200° F when we make ceramics. The abalone shell doesn’t do this, of course. So Mehmet wondered if we could make materials at seawater temperature. The real breakthroughs now are coming in the area of self-assembling materials that mimic the way the abalone creates its puff-pastry architecture of hard mineral and soft polymer. Jeff Brinker, who’s at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, works in the area of self-assembling materials. This will be the way we make products in the future. It’s coming.

What did you learn from the late biocomputing futurist Michael Conrad?

Michael Conrad felt that every cell in our body is a sophisticated computer, in the sense that it is taking in data all the time. But it computes with these self-assembling, three-dimensional molecules that jigsaw together. This is computing through shape, a completely different paradigm than computing with ones and zeroes on silicon. This is computing on carbon, also known as wet computing.

What sort of work is going on at Arizona State University in Tempe that could revolutionize our energy industry?

There’s a group of 25 scientists or so who work at the Center for Early Events in Photosynthesis, who study the first few picoseconds, literally. They’re mimicking a cell and doing chemistry with sunlight.

What does it mean to grow food like a prairie?

Wes Jackson runs a research organization called The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. He realized that industrial agriculture is a failure because it grows miles and miles of annual plants in a monoculture. To plant annuals, you have to dig up the soil each year with tractor diesel, leading to massive erosion. To recoup fertility, you add fertilizer made from natural gas. The monoculture is an all-you-can-eat restaurant for plants, so you add pesticides, another fossil fuel product! It’s ten kilocalories of oil for every kilocalorie of corn. He asked, “What if we were to learn from the prairie next door?” A prairie is a perennial polyculture, so for 27 years he’s been trying to perennialize our major crops and plant them in mixtures. His scientific staff now is world-class. But, of course, he could use lots more scientists working on this.

Let’s play a word association game. Hummingbirds.

Poster child for sustainability. In the process of getting the fuel they need through nectar, hummingbirds manage to pollinate flowers, which ensures that there will be fuel next year for them or for other hummingbirds. That’s the kind of system I would like us to have at our gas stations.

Chimpanzees.

Chimps are tremendous teachers in terms of what we should be eating. They are masters of smart eating, and now we realize that they self-medicate. They’re able to choose certain plants in particular bushes and prepare them in particular ways to heal themselves. Howler monkeys pick plants that will actually bring on fertility during the reproductive stage, or delay it. So they seem to have not just self-medication going on but also birth control.

Purple bacteria.

A very ancient kind of bacteria that’s being studied because they photosynthesize. It also has a pump within it that would make hydraulic engineers jealous. When lit by the sun, it pumps ions through its membrane, upstream, against gradient.

Rhinoceros horns.

Rhinos dig with their horns and use them as swords to spar with. If they get a crack in the horn, it’s a problem. Surprisingly, we found that they don’t seem to get cracks in the horn, and if they do, the cracks seem to heal up. When there’s a crack, the material around the crack disassembles, pours into the crack, and then reassembles. We have no idea how this happens because there are no living cells in the horn. It’s made entirely of dead hair! We’re looking at it as a model for self-healing structures.

In my materials research, I’ve come across the work of Scott White at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He’s working with self-healing plastic.

Yes. There are self-healing plastics and self-healing concretes. We basically put [in concrete] little capsules of an epoxy, of a gluelike material, that when the concrete flexes will break and pour into the crack. It’s an exciting but crude approximation of the amazing process that goes on in rhino horns.

Coral reefs.

Well, besides the fact that they’re bleaching worldwide, which is a very big problem, coral reefs are a tremendous model of what’s called a Type 3 ecosystem. A Type 1 ecosystem is an ecosystem that’s temporary, like a carpet of weeds in an open field. Berry bushes move in and then eventually it’s a forest. A mature forest - like a coral reef - is a Type 3 ecosystem. These are complex communities, an incredible society of organisms that are in deep symbiosis with one another. Business managers are looking at these Type 3 systems, believe it or not, as a model for a new way to organize our whole economy so that it’s much more interconnected, interdependent, and less of the competitive model that has a lot of inherent waste in it. More and more, it’s about the closed-loop, tightly woven food web, where nothing is wasted; there’s always somebody there to catch that next little particle of food and use it.

Have we been successful in mimicking spider silk yet?

This incredible material is five times stronger than steel. In Biomimicry I wrote about researchers [Fritz Vollrath et al.] who were very keen to figure out how to make this fiber the way a spider does - in water and at room temperature - without petroleum, without heating it up, and without sulfuric acid. Since then, Montreal-based Nexia Biotechnologies has decided to take the gene out of the spider and put it into a goat and then have the goat milk the protein, which turns into the fiber. The transgenic goat milks the protein from its mammary gland. And then the goat gets cloned. Gene transfer from spiders to goats doesn’t happen in the natural world! Besides, this is just domestication with a twist. To truly emulate would be to find the recipe, find the way to manufacture in water at room temperature, like Jeff Brinker did with abalone. We need to find the recipe and cook it in our own kitchen, and leave the organisms alone. That to me is true biomimicry.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 11:06 pm and is filed under MC Weekly. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.