Let's learn from nature while we still have it

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, technology, nature, innovation

This is a Crystal Jellyfish. Crystal jellies the original source of green fluorescent protein (GFP), which has become an important diagnostic tool.

Curiously, when Osamu Shimomura, a survivor of the atomic attack on Nagasaki, first isolated the luminescent compound in these jellyfish, it glowed a deep blue. Further work led to another compound, a protein, that fluoresced a brilliant green, stimulated by the light from the blue compound. That protein can now be synthesized (no more need to blenderize jellyfish). GFP has so many uses I can only mention a few: tagging genes to elucidate their expression or localization profiles, acting as a biosensor or cell marker, studying protein-protein interactions, and visualizing promoter activity. Dr. Shimomura received a Nobel Prize in 2008.

For microscopic viewing, versions of the protein have been developed that fluoresce in different colors. I remember the old dyes I learned to use to stain biological samples, such as eosin or carmine. Now a simpler process can be used to attach different fluorescent dyes to different tissues or organelles: when illuminated with UV, they glow in surreal colors on a black background. The WOW factor is enormous! Witness:

The eosin-stained cells are from scraping a spoon inside someone's cheek. They are the easiest animal cells to harvest without pain or bloodshed. Those on the right are somewhat smaller cells at higher magnification, from elsewhere in the body. I don't know the source (literally millions of such photos appear online, many without attribution). In the image on the right it is worth noting the targeting: GFP was attached to a molecule that homes in on the microtubules that enable cell movement; the blue version was targeted to the DNA in the nuclei; and the red version has been attached to mitochondria. In the image at left, the mitochondria are barely visible as a kind of "grit" in the cells, surrounding the nuclei, which are darkly stained.

This is just one application of a natural material to perform numerous technical tasks. Dozens of others are described in Nature's Wild Ideas: How the Natural World is Inspiring Scientific Innovation by Kristy Hamilton. The chapters number a baker's dozen, but with multiple ideas per chapter, we see an amazing plethora of nature-inspired materials and mechanisms. In her Acknowledgement the author notes that another book (or a few) could be written from other material she gathered. She had to be quite selective to produce "only" one book!

How do we organize three or four robots (perhaps a search-and-rescue team)? Central management can probably do the trick. What if the "team" numbers a thousand, or 10,000? Robot swarms. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise," wrote Solomon in Proverbs 6:6. So some scientists did just that, to learn how tiny, apparently mindless creatures can self-organize in ways that would defeat a supercomputer (this from Chapter 4). What they learned is being used throughout robotics.

You can't put a band-aid on a wet finger. But mussels can glue their little byssus threads to shells and stones while under water, and corals can cement themselves to the substrate with a different underwater glue (Chapters 6&7). Their chemical tricks are being used to develop glues to hold together the edges of wounds in spite of the blood.

We can't see UV light, unless it's bright enough to do damage. Many birds can see it, at least a little. Scientists are still disputing over whether they see the UV reflected from spider webs, and so avoid flying through them. But a UV-reflective pattern on glass seems to deter most birds from flying into window panes (Chapter 12). At the natural history museum where I work part time, most of the dead birds brought in by people in the area are from window strikes.

In one evocative portion the author tells of the pervasive destruction wrought by humanity on the rest of nature. When a species becomes extinct, all the genes and traits that characterize it, the product of 4 billion years of evolution, vanish forever. No creature, it seems, is without something to give us or to teach us. Nature is an immense library of "what worked to keep us going for billennia." She quotes one medical researcher, "We are burning down the library faster than we can read it."

Read this bit of the global library, a volume that has been gleaned from a thousand thousand stories.