Companies are PAYING People to Plagiarize?!
MIND = BLOWN.
Seriously, what could be cooler?
Since, I’m so flattered by becoming a jack of all trades (still looking for that thing where I can be Master of One), I’ve branched out into perfectly irrelevant fields. I joined a racing team and got involved with the mechanical side of engineering. That translates to, if I have an idea, it’s relatively easier for me to test it out and then build it. I can figuratively and literally see my idea come to life.
That got my attention faster than someone saying ATTENDANCE! (all you virtual meet students feel me?). I loved our simple process of starting out with a design and reiterating it till we had a version we liked (budget is a constraint that inspires creativity), taking it to the racetrack and testing it out. Being able to physically reach out and touch my idea brought me more joy than microscopically seeing an organism replicate or change colors.
I got into biotechnology primarily because of my love for biology. I loved learning about all the cool features animals had evolved and breaking it down to understand it. I guess you could say I was looking at biology and living organisms like an engineer. I wanted to break it apart, put it back together, possibly add in a few more things and watch it (hopefully) get better. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help me like my major.
So, I broke my major down at its most basic level. Biotechnology is the fusion of biology with technology. For the team I’m constantly on the lookout for new designs and see how we can bring over an idea to integrate into our electric go-kart. On one of these hunts, I found the concept vehicles that many of the world’s top automakers had come up with as part of the annual LA Design Challenge.
Much like most engineers, with the clock racing, they tried to find something to copy off of. The top engineers intuitively turned to the ultimate designer, nature. This ingenious copying caught on.
The top organizations, the revolutionary tech startups, the race cars, the jets-they’re all paying people to plagiarize ideas from nature. It’s called biomimicry, or biomimetic engineering, if you can copy an idea well enough to solve problems, you could virtually create millions!
Moore’s Law is dying and with it, comes the slowdown of the tech revolution. You might not notice it right now because society is still catching up with ideas from decades ago (the first crude electric car was designed in 1832), but much like Bollywood filmmakers, engineers are running out of ideas and switching to mimicking nature’s many tested designs to come up with concepts for various products.
Technology may seem to be the most advanced design we know of, but it pales in front of Mother Nature. The superior blend of features across plants and animals shows a capability to survive in any terrain, environment, while sustaining itself. Biomimicry has taken off and is a widely explored domain across industries which is soon to bring attention to the community of biologists that can work with engineers and hence, we introduce a new team player-the biomimetic engineer-with the best of both worlds.
Hence, begins the exploration of a bioengineer down the rabbit hole.
