Audio Options:
Listen | 47 mins. | 5.5 MB | Right-Click to Download

Text Options:
Read full interview text below or download PDF

Explain this idea of “the material is the mechanism”.
It’s about moving away from the classical idea of materials - inert stuff that serves a structural role - towards the more contemporary notion of materials. More and more, materials are active and respond to stimuli in their environment. Materials can light up when an electric current is passed through them; materials can swell and contract in response to changes in temperature or acidity. Increasingly, there’s a blurring of boundaries between what is a material and what is a machine.

If you were to draw a materials family tree, where would you begin and what would be its main branches?
The main branches are ceramics (including rocks), which is the oldest branch of materials; natural materials (wood, leather, plant fibres, etc.), also very old; metals; and synthetic polymers. Since the 20th century, it would be fair to say that the introduction of synthetic polymers has been the biggest change we’ve seen in materials science. Things now, of course, are very diverse. The branch tips have split into countless categories, many of them overlapping. But one of the most significant has to be semiconductors.

Which natural materials have changed our lives or have the hope to change our future?
In addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned, there’s paper, which enabled the printing revolution. Looking ahead, we’re starting to explore nature more closely and use its principles to make new types of materials. Biological materials are made from either protein, where the raw materials are amino acids, or nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, or polysaccharides (carbohydrates), where the raw materials are sugars. Biology manages to do an incredibly wide range of things with proteins, in particular: horn, skin, tendon, and transparent material that makes up the lenses of our eyes. So materials scientists are inspired to look to proteins to see how they might be able to redesign them. For example, genetically engineered bacteria can produce new kinds of proteins that might create novel and biodegradable plastics. (more…)

Audio Options:
Listen | 53 mins. | 6.1 MB | Right-Click to Download

Text Options:
Read full interview text below or download PDF

With our increased capacity and sophisticated scientific tools, we have the opportunity to align ourselves more closely with nature than ever before. What do you think?
More powerful micro and macro scopes 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 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.
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 4200 degrees Fahrenheit 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 bio-computing futurist Michael Conrad?
Michael Conrad felt that every cell in our body is a sophisticated computer, in the sense that it is taking in inputs 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. (more…)