Episode 042 | February 6, 2023 | 23:03
Guest: —
Published: February 6, 2023
Duration: 23:03
Description
“Biomimicry is not chopping off elephant trunks and using that. It s not directly using something from nature, but it s taking the blueprint of that design using whatever materials make sense for the application.”
This is how this week s guest, Ayla, explains biomimicry.
In this episode – aside from Lasse making his hosting debut – we re talking to Ayla about what biomimicry is and we discover the vast applications it has inside of healthcare.
Enjoy!
Full transcript
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Biomimicry is, we’re not directly chopping off elephants’ trunks and attaching it, so it’s not directly using something from nature, but it’s taking the blueprint of that design and using whatever materials make sense for the application. They may have found an algae that grows in the ocean, that has a lot of resistance to UV radiation, so they take that algae and they extract the active molecules that provide that UV protection and they put that into some cream.
Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. My name is Lese Angestrand, I’m a senior consultant with Green Innovation Group and today we’re speaking with Ayla Kiser who is a specialist and researcher in biomimicry and nature-inspired solutions and innovation. The conversation explains what is this topic about and also provides examples for how to implement this in a healthcare setting. So first of all, thank you so much for joining us Ayla. I would really love if you could tell us who you are and what’s your background. Sure, well thank you Lasse for having me and Joachim and Frederik for having invited me. So my background, I started off in engineering.
I am from the United States so I did all of my university studies in the U.S. and I went into mechanical engineering to begin with and I got my bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering which was nice but there was something that was missing for me in that program which later I realized was some biology and some connection to nature. So after I finished my mechanical engineering degree I went to France, I taught English, I ate a lot of cheese and a little bit of wine here and there and did some reflecting and realized well okay mechanical engineering was super interesting but I need a little bit more nature and biology. So then I went back to school and did my master’s in PhD in environmental engineering and I focused on nanomaterials for my dissertation, nanomaterials in wastewater and what would happen to nanomaterials that were released into this sewer system and went through a wastewater treatment plant and because a lot of consumer products that we’re using today have some nanomaterials in them and could this have some impact on the environment in the future and if so where might we see these nanoparticles ending up in the environment. So that’s what I did for my studies and then I had a couple of postdoc positions in the area of environmental engineering and interesting stuff but again I still felt I wanted more of nature and I had heard about biomimicry while I was still a PhD student and it immediately when I think I watched somehow and I don’t remember how I came across it but I saw Janine Benius’s TED Talk from I think it was early 2000s when she recorded this or 2006 or something like this and when I heard that it was like ah okay this makes complete sense and that was something that I wanted to learn more about and get into and at some point some years after I started my after I finished my PhD program and I was a postdoc I found out that Arizona State University was offering a master’s degree in biomimicry. So just to push you there if I could just ask you to maybe define biomimicry before we move on to the to the next part of the of the of the history I think it would be good for people to understand what does that mean biomimicry. Yeah for sure so it’s a term that’s not so well known I would say but it is something that we’ve been practicing for many years. Biomimicry is essentially trying to learn from nature and specifically mimic or imitate the forms processes or systems that we find in nature that are biologically based hence biomimicry in order to solve human challenges and this field it can really be applied to almost all domains that humans are working in from architecture to healthcare obviously which is why we’re here to transportation urban design I mean it’s really it can be applied to so many areas of our lives and that’s because when we do biomimicry we’re really focused on functions so I mean for example yes nature doesn’t grow iPods for example or iPads or smartphones but all of the functions when we start breaking down what these technologies do or what we want to do with these technologies such as sending signals receiving signals computing all of those functions are found in nature and so when we try to solve a problem and we’re trying to achieve a particular function we can search for those functions in nature because there’s a really good chance that what we’re trying to do has already been been done in nature and life has been on earth for about 3.8 billion years now so over that time there have been some really great strategies that have developed to function and accomplish many different functions in many different environments so nature is almost like a catalog of solutions that we can tap into for inspiration and for actual design blueprints for the problems that we’re trying to solve I would love to get back to some of those examples a bit later and dive into especially how it could be applied in the industry that we are concerned with in this podcast the healthcare industry but I think before we dive into the deeper examples and and get more texture on that I would love to hear so you had this inspiration you realize biomimicry is a thing and this is something that could actually be combined with your with your field of expertise at this point so I would love to just get the rest of the background out to date so we have a sense of where we are today or what brought you here basically yeah so I found out about the biomimicry program at Arizona State University the master’s degree that they were offering I went back to school even though I had been in school for so many years and it’s finally out after my PhD and thought ah I’m free but no I decided to go back just to really get an in-depth view and understanding of biomimicry and it was a fantastic experience so while I was still a student about two years into the program normally master’s degrees in the US are two years but I was working full-time so it took me four years and yeah about two years in I saw an advertisement from a job posting from Johnson and Johnson and Johnson and Johnson is an international company in health care maybe one of the biggest companies in in general health care they do pharmaceuticals medical devices and consumer products like cosmetics or over-the-counter medications and they had put out a job announcement for a postdoctoral scientist in biomimicry and I kind of fell out of my chair when I saw that because here was this huge multinational corporation asking for specifically for someone to do research for them in biomimicry because it’s I mean that’s something that was quite unheard of for a company to be asking for biomimicry and for a specialist to be working in the company on biomimicry so when I saw that I thought okay this is for me and I had my research already my research background in environmental engineering which involved quite a bit of biology mostly in the form of microbiology plus my studies in biomimicry and they hired me and so of course I finished my master’s degree and I was working at J&J for about five years and I worked really within I would say across the consumer sector I didn’t do any work directly with pharmaceuticals or with medical devices I just had some interactions with them but I was really hired to work in consumer and I worked on skincare, oral care, baby care and self-care which is over-the-counter treatments and also a little bit with the packaging team so that’s just to give you an idea of how biomimicry can be really can be applied to so many different areas even within one company but yeah it’s it’s very multi-purpose a multi-purpose tool amazing and I would love to get back to some of those examples I’m just curious so I did a bit of research and I encountered the term nature inspired innovation is there a is there a distinction between that and biomimicry there is or there can be it really depends on the person who’s using the term and what they’re intending that to mean there are actually ISO standards that define what biomimicry is and what bioinspiration is I mean there are these different technical terms and a lot of times yeah people are talking about not necessarily biomimicry but designs or solutions that are more generally inspired by nature for example in cosmetics you know they may have found an algae that grows in the ocean that has a lot of resistance to UV radiation so they take that algae and they extract the active molecules that provide that UV protection and they put that into some cream so that would be an example of like a nature inspired solution or a bio inspired solution and not necessarily biomimicry because they’re just taking something directly from nature but kind of in an inspired way whereas biomimicry is really trying to mimic a molecule a form a process without necessarily using the source of inspiration and so that’ll be like I’ll give you a rough example to to illustrate that so for example there there was a company in there is a company in Germany Festo that developed a robotic arm mimicking an elephant’s trunk because an elephant’s trunk is super flexible it has many different degrees of freedom but it’s also very strong and up until that point most robotic arms had been very rigid and didn’t have the sensitivity also that an elephant’s trunk has so biomimicry is we’re not directly chopping off elephant’s trunks and so it’s not directly using something from nature but it’s taking the blueprint of that design and using whatever materials make sense for the application mimicking that blueprint or that design so they created a structure out of some who knows some type of plastic and maybe some metal to mimic the form and the structure of an elephant’s trunk so I think it’s really interesting here it seems that this concept of biomimicry can be applied at a lot of different levels and I think I mean me personally I was thinking of examples where I would encounter this in the real world already and the first thing that came up was kind of this nature nature inspired design like if you think about the these tree like structures in the gardens by the bay in Singapore it’s something where we design wise we mimic the structure or the at least the appearance of some nature based solution but I have a sense that biomimicry goes at least one or several steps deeper and can be applied at several levels so I would love if you could just I mean I would say if we’re seeing structures out in the world we’re probably talking more about nature inspired design but biomimicry is that is it correctly understood that this goes to different levels like and how deep does it go is it to the micro level to the molecular level to the nano level like what at what levels does biomimicry apply and and where is it most relevant would you say yeah that’s a great question and really you can seek inspiration from nature on all scales from the nano level up to the macro scale and also I would say that with biomimicry we’re really thinking about a specific function that we’re trying to achieve and we’re finding that nature that function out in nature so some species that’s able to accomplish that function we learn about the mechanisms that species uses to accomplish that function and once we understand the biological mechanism we can translate those biological mechanisms into some design principles that we can apply and into some some product or process so you can you can emulate nature on multiple scales and really focusing on function and also we can we can emulate the form of something we can for example with molecules we can now find some molecules that are interesting in nature and then we can synthetically reproduce those we can mimic a process that occurs in nature such as maybe the synthesis process for some material and we can also and what I think is the most interesting but also the most challenging is we can try to mimic nature on a more systemic level so mimicking systems thinking about for example how ecosystems function and the transfer of materials and energy within an ecosystem and is that something that we can really start thinking about when we’re developing a product or trying to improve how a system functions hmm I think that it sounds to me like that also is a point where the study of biomimicry or the field of biomimicry becomes very wide and very how to say it’s it’s it’s a composite of many different fields that interact in the field like in the within the concept of biomimicry a lot of different specialties and expertise must be intersecting yeah oh yeah and biomimicry by nature is very transdisciplinary so when you try to solve a problem it’s important to bring in a biologist bring in a chemist bring in a product designer it’s really and that’s what I think makes it so rich it’s bringing together different fields to solve a problem and this is kind of how ecosystems function when we look at the for example a service provided by an ecosystem that services the result of multiple species working together to create that ecosystem service so we can yeah we can think about the way we solve problems in the same way let’s bring together different species so a physicist chemist biologist data analyst all kinds of different species to try to solve a problem and in that way where we end up breaking down more silos we naturally start thinking on more of a systems level and for sustainability and for sustainable health care I think this is essential to to work as much as we can towards thinking in terms of ecosystems and trying to solve health care problems thinking about an ecosystem and yeah so rather that than having a specific focus on say a single symptom or a single specific treatment or yeah and I mean I think we’ve a lot of pacific experience this just in our our healthcare our medical system I don’t know how things are in Denmark I have less experience here in France but in the US if I for example if I had a problem with my skin so some dermatology issue I would go to a dermatologist and there would be very little focus or questioning about different aspects of my system my body like okay how are you eating how’s your sleep how are your stress levels it was just very focused on this particular patch of skin where there was a problem for example and oh here’s your cortisone cream or what have you so there wasn’t communication between the dermatologist and someone who understands the GI tract or what have you but now we’re learning more a lot more about the like for example the microbiome and there’s the gut brain axis and in J&J we were talking about the gut brain skin axis and how these things are interconnected and we can’t just focus on one while ignoring these other aspects of our system so I think we treat healthcare in this kind of siloed very reductionist way typically I mean at least historically it seems that’s how it’s been in western healthcare systems but then we also treat the environment in the same way at least that’s what I’m observing we’re looking at particular aspects of environmental problems and treating the environment sometimes a bit in a reductionist way but we really need to start thinking about the environment our healthcare and all of the products that we produce all of our technologies as functioning within a system and I think that’s where biomimicry can really it’s one of different tools that can help push us towards more system level thinking and solutioning definitely I think in conclusion I would love if you could not exactly as a summary but I’m just wondering if you could if if the listeners of this podcast has to have to take one one key thing with them from from listening to this what is it that you would want them to know about biomimicry I would want them to know that biomimicry can absolutely apply to the work that they’re doing because whatever they’re working on there’s a good chance that nature has already found the solution or that solution exists in nature and I think I would really hope that people could get into the practice of when they have a problem to solve towards at the very beginning of trying to solve this problem asking how does nature solve this problem what would nature do and just asking that question I think opens a lot of doors and it’s that mindset that will allow us to think broader think more holistically on a systems level what would nature do how would nature solve this problem that’s not a question that we typically ask we really look at what we’ve done in the past we try to make incremental improvements etc but we’re surrounded by millions of solutions and I think it’s just this huge source of information that we can tap into and if we can start thinking this way at the very beginning of a project that will make great change I highly agree I think it’s at least for me it’s a it’s a it’s a really tangible inspiration that to add that as a question in your idea generation process or in your troubleshooting process almost no matter the level of the organization that you are in if it’s a very detailed and technical problem or if it’s a systems level organizational problem asking yourself as one of the steps in your idea generation or troubleshooting what would nature do in this case how would nature solve this problem I think it’s a really powerful question to add into that process and I don’t think it would take a lot of effort for people to try it out and to see how what could come of that idea generation maybe sometimes you fall short and nothing comes up and you go about your business but that didn’t really cost you much I think it’s it’s a it’s a really low effort but very high potential gain to add that into considerations yes I agree 100% all right thank you Eila for for the input I’m hoping that we can continue this conversation in part two and diving a bit deeper into some of the examples of how to apply biomimicry in the world at large and in healthcare sustainability specifically so I’m hoping that you will join us for for another round I’m looking forward to that see you next time for more biomimicry part two thank you so much for listening to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast we really enjoyed speaking to Eila in this episode and we hope you got some inspiration for your work be it on systems level or in a very deep technical expertise you can learn more about sustainability in healthcare operations on greeninnovationgroup.com please do reach out if you have any questions or concerns or you can find us on LinkedIn as well we hope to see you next time