Introduction to Biotechnologies and Biomimetics for Civil Engineering - Biotechnologies and Biomimetics for Civil Engineering - page 7

as a proof that this curriculum is an obsolete one, which constitutes a worrying issue
in the context of future of twenty-first century sustainable development challenges.
However, ''recent'' nanotechnology achievements regarding the replication of
natural systems may provide a solution to solve some of the aforementioned
sustainability challenges related to the field of civil engineering. Nanotechnology
deals with an atom scale (1 nm = 1 9 10 -9 m). A hydrogen atom has a diameter
of about one tenth of a nanometer and it takes six bonded carbon atoms to reach a
nanometer width. In Nature there are innumerous examples of the nanoscale but
one of the most interesting in the ''civil engineering context'' is the 1-2 nm
hydrophobic wax crystals that cover lotus leaves and are responsible for their self-
clean ability (Varadan et al. 2010 ). This new field encompasses a holistic way of
perceiving the potential of natural systems (Martin et al. 2010 ) in which traditional
and predominant anthropocentric views are replaced by more eco-centrically
approaches (Hofstra and Huisingh 2014 ) as prerequisite in order to build a sus-
tainable future. It is worth mentioning that this ecological imperative is very far
from the 1828 Royal Charter of the Institution of Civil Engineers main purpose,
which defined civil engineering as the art of ''directing the great sources of power
in nature for the use and convenience of man…'' (Muir-Wood 2012 ). Strangely as
may seems most civil engineering curriculum and most civil engineering depart-
ments in the world still live by this two century outdated and unsustainable motto
and some even went to the paradox extreme of try to marketing it as a curriculum
forged in sustainable development principles.
The crucial importance of Nature's lessons relates to the fact that it always uses
ambient conditions with minimum waste and no pollution, where the result is
mostly biodegradable by the contrary man-made materials are processed by
heating and pressurizing generating enormous hazardous wastes (Bar-Cohen
2006 ). On her inspired topic Benyus ( 1997 ) quoted Mehmet Sarikaya, Professor of
material's science and engineering at the University of Washington who wrote:
''We are on the brink of a material's revolution that will be on par with the Iron
Age and the Industrial Revolution. We are leaping forward into a new age of
materials. Within the next century, I think biomimetics, will significantly alter the
way in which we live. Learning from nature can become a great challenge for
future management''. And in fact some more or less recent papers on biological
materials (Sarikaya et al. 2003 ; Sanchez et al. 2005 ; Chen et al. 2012 ; Yang et al.
2013 ; Amini and Miserez 2013 ) especially the highly cited papers of Markaya
et al. (with 823 Scopus citations by May of 2014) and of Sanchez et al. (with 517
Scopus citations by May of 2014) and the extensively detailed paper of Chen et al.
serve as a confirmation of the 1997 Saikaya's predictions.
The Biomimicry Institute, founded in 2006 by Janine Benyus, was precursor in
this field providing the AskNature online library of research articles on biomimetic
design indexed by function. The term biomimetics was used by the first time by
Otto Schmitt during the 1950s and relates to the development of novel technol-
ogies through the distillation of principles from the study of biological systems.
This author made a distinction between an engineering/physics approach to the
biological sciences, which was termed ''biophysics,'' and a biological approach to