長篇閱讀之科技篇： 科技與自然

Technology that imitates nature

Biomimetics: Engineers are increasingly taking a leaf out of nature's book when looking for solutions to design problems

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AFTER taking his dog for a walk one day in the early 1940s, George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor, became curious about the seeds of the burdock plant that had attached themselves to his clothes and to the dog's fur. Under a microscope, he looked closely at the hook-and-loop system that the seeds have evolved to hitchhike on passing animals and aid pollination, and he realised that the same approach could be used to join other things together. The result was Velcr a product that was arguably more than three billion years in the making, since that is how long the natural mechanism that inspired it took to evolve.

Velcro is probably the most famous and certainly the most successful example of biological mimicry, or “biomimetics”. In fields from robotics to materials science, technologists are increasingly borrowing ideas from nature, and with good reason: nature's designs have, by definition, stood the test of time, so it would be foolish to ignore them. Yet transplanting natural designs into man-made technologies is still a hit-or-miss affair.

Engineers depend on biologists to discover interesting mechanisms for them to exploit, says Julian Vincent, the director of the Centre for Biomimetic and Natural Technologies at the University of Bath in England. So he and his colleagues have been working on a scheme to enable engineers to bypass the biologists and tap into nature's ingenuity directly, via a database of “biological patents”. The idea is that this database will let anyone search through a wide range of biological mechanisms and properties to find natural solutions to technological problems.

How not to reinvent the wheel

Surely human intellect, and the deliberate application of design knowledge,

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