“Nature doesn’t have separate departments like chemistry, physics, biology”
Just got back from the lab after presenting an idea of integrating biomechanical and biochemical factors in the immunological research. And this video gave me another reason to get motivated.
This is a quite interesting talk with Donald Ingber, founding director of Wyss Institute, related to the limitations, present and future of biological research. I would try my best to summarize the 37 minutes talk into 4 minutes read article.
The title comes from very famous American philosopher-Buckminster Fuller. However, forgetting the nature’s integrative approach, we started to make separate departments which separate us to think about the solution. We prefer to call ourselves physicists or biologists, which restrict us from understanding that nature has only one department, only one coordinating system.
Fortunately, recently, the hype of interdisciplinarity is on the rise which is bringing more people from different disciplines in one place. However, it is not that easy to accept and apply interdisciplinarity. For instance, when it is about biology, we are so much addicted to biochemical and genetic factors and we have overlooked the importance of mechanical factors. More than 100 years ago, everything used to be described in terms of mechanics. Then, once molecular biology and genetics came in, mechanics became an useless factor in biological research. Likewise, from past to till now, we are becoming reductionist and focusing on the few parts, a single gene or few genes or a factor. And this is how biology at present works.
So here comes the importance of biologically inspired engineering in which you see and learn from the nature to engineer new things and the institute focused on biologically inspired engineering with the people from different disciplines and solving the problems as a collective. Telling the people to do interdisciplinary work might not work. So goal should be to put them in interdisciplinary environment along with diversity in terms of culture and countries as well. It is very important to know about the fundamental principles of nature like network, collective interactions, hiearchial things and how small parts put together can give a new functionality. For example, each one of us are made up of molecules, or cells or tissues or organs. Each one has different functionality but with their combination they give different functionality. This is the principle of biologically inspired engineering.
In the interview, Dr. Ingber emphasizes on the model Wyss Institute works. The institute leverages recent insights into how Nature builds, controls and manufactures to develop new engineering innovations — a new field of research we call Biologically Inspired Engineering. By emulating biological principles of self assembly, organization and regulation, the institute is focused on the development of disruptive technology solutions for healthcare, energy, architecture, robotics, and manufacturing, which are translated into commercial products and therapies through formation of new startups and corporate alliance.
But again the main challenge is to bring ideas into fruition. First and foremost, the problem is very much important. Like previously mentioned, bringing unusual people in the team with different perspectives, diverse culture and skills make more sense. Nevertheless, excitement of the challenge among the team is another important criteria. Likewise, applying things that have been never applied before is equally important. It is also important to be structured , for eg. like a translational funnel. It is also important to teach people very early on putting in the report of inventions to get feedback from lawyers. It helps a grad student or a postdoc to change their experimental design to be on the shortest distance path to impact. They should be able to identify early on an application that they think would be a high value impact, which may not be the final one but with the focus like you are almost starting a company. Then another step could be to bring the business development people to find out the answer to questions like- Is this really a important problem? Is there a market? Are there investors? This is how we can de-risk technically or commercially. Obviously, another important criteria is the structure for funding and support.
However, translating the academic project into product in the market has been a valley of death. There could be a case when the postdoc of the project finds a good job and leaves a job or nobody ever pick it up again or it is too early for the market to accept or there could be also the cases when patents are submitted but not followed up.
Then what is the future of biologically inspired engineering? Obviously it would be AI which is going to change we do everything. Likewise, synthetic biology is about to explode. Now, it is not just about engineering bacteria or yeast, now the time has began for human cells. For example, CAR-T cells which are engineered cells for immunotherapy are already FDA approved. It is just classic one gene engineering but people are trying to engineer whole circuits in human cells. It is also possible to have programmable living cellular device. Once we could use living cells as medical devices which is seamless, biocompatible, biodegradable, get to places where they want to do things and do it at a self organization level, this is going to transform the medicine. Another hot topic is bioelectricity. It was poo pooed for 100 years and just beginning to be recognized same like mechanics.
However, recalling the title of the article again, nature does not work like that. So the best opportunities are going to take all these different approaches in the future and melding them into one.
This is what biologically inspired engineering does.
This is just a note I had taken for the motivation while watching the interview . Apologies for any mistake.
