Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Surface
engineering
Medicine
Manipulate extracellular matrix
environment
Tissue
engineering
Biomimetic
scaffolds
Micro and nano
technologies
Biology
Materials
science
Figure 6.1 Schematic illustration of the different fi elds involved in the current
tissue engineering strategy highlighting the inputs brought to biomimetics.
6.2
Biomimetics: Definition and Historical
Background
6.2.1 Defi nition
Biomimetics is the field of scientific endeavor, which attempts to design
systems and synthesize materials through biomimicry. Bio meaning life
and mimesis meaning imitation are originally derived from Greek [3]. In
the 1950s, Otto Schmitt coined the term “Biomimetics” for the transfer of
ideas and analogues from biology to technology. He attempted to produce
a physical device that explicitly mimicked the electrical action of a nerve.
By 1957, he had come to perceive what he would later label biomimetics
[4]. Then came the term bionics which was coined by Jack Steele of the US
Air Force in 1960. He defined it as the science of systems which have some
function copied from nature, or which represent characteristics of natural
systems or their analogues [4].
In 1969, Schmitt used the word biomimetics in the title of a paper and
the word made its first public appearance in Webster's Dictionary in 1974,
accompanied by the following definition: The study of the formation,
structure, or function of biologically produced substances and materials
(as enzymes or silk) and biological mechanisms and processes (as protein
synthesis or photosynthesis) especially for the purpose of synthesizing
similar products by artificial mechanisms which mimic natural ones [5].
Recently, biomimetics has been defi ned as “A relatively young study
embracing the practical use of mechanisms and functions of biological sci-
ence in engineering, design, chemistry, electronics, and so on” [6]. In the
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