50 AMERICANWAY
FEBRUARY 1 2008
D E S I G N S O N N A T U R E
Humansmay have
designed technologies to go to themoon, to split
atoms, and tosend informationas lightpulses, butwe still can’t swimas fast as
a sharkorhear aswell asabat. Nor canwe synthesizehigh-impact ceramicsas
strongasanabaloneshellorweavefibersasstrongasspidersilk.
•
Forcenturies,
philosophersandbiologistshaveremindedusthatnaturehasa lottoteach.Now
agrowingnumberofengineers,physicists,materialscientists,andarchitectsare
joiningtherankstotrytofigureouthowanimalsandplants,andtheecosystems
theyform,canhelpusdesign industrialprocessesandproductsofallsorts.
Variously called biomimicry, biomimetics,
bionics, and biologically inspired design,
this growing field has also attracted corpo-
rate attention. Since its inception 10 years
ago, the Biomimicry Guild, a consulting
firmbased inHelena,Montana, hasadvised
nearly 300 companies— some of them gi-
ants such as Nike and Procter & Gamble.
Demandhas been so great, in fact, that the
guild recently foundedanonprofit sister or-
ganization, theBiomimicryInstitute inMis-
soula,Montana, which acts primarily as an
educationalorganization, trainingbiologists
and organizingworkshops and conferences
tohelp trainothers topickup the slack.
At least a dozen American universities,
including the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, the University of California at
Berkeley, the University of Maryland, and
theGeorgiaInstituteofTechnology,havees-
tablished interdisciplinary research centers
dedicated tofinding solutions toall kindsof
problemsby lookingat howplants andani-
mals solve them. Andmanymore research
centershavebeen startedoverseas.
So great is the academic ferment that
Biomimetic Connections, a firm in Union
City, California, has built a matchmaking
businessthatpairsuniversitypatentholders
with companies that are interested inusing
thepatent holders’ biologically inspiredde-
signs.Awholehostoffirms subscribe to the
company’sBioParadigmAccessdatabases.
“There’s a lot ofwisdombaked into every
species,” says John Pietrzyk, president and
CEOofBiomimeticConnections. “We show
people that we can design things by build-
ingaround
[
that
]
wisdom.”
What’s surprising is not that we’re min-
ingnature for ideas but that it has takenus
so long todo it in such abigway. “After 3.8
billion years of research and development,
failuresare fossils, andwhat surroundsus is
the secret to survival,”wroteJanineBenyus,
the president of the Biomimicry Guild, in
her book
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired
by Nature
, which helped to popularize the
fieldof biologically inspireddesign.
Somemight claim thatmimickingnature
isn’texactlynew, though.OrvilleandWilbur
Wright studied birds while designing the
first airplane. Velcro resultedwhen a Swiss
engineer began towonder how the seeds of
theburdockplant stuck so stubbornly tohis
woolen socks. Engineers modeled the nose
cone of the Japanese Shinkansen bullet
trainon thebeakofakingfisher. In themed-
ical field’s search for therapies and cures,
