Peter Forbes

_ When I began researching The Gecko’s Foot, around a decade ago now, spider silk was the hottest material in the bioinspired armoury. But after the high-profile attempts to produce spider silk from genetically engineered goats failed, the subject was back-burnered. The spider silk genes are so large and repetitive and the processing of the gel in the spinnerets so subtle that the spider kept its secret.

But now scientists at the University of Wyoming have done what might have seemed a good idea form the start: insert the spider silk genes into the silkworm. Silkworms have been commercial silk-producing organisms for millennia so this is promising at last. The research is reported in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fact that the silk comes out of Laramie prompts the thought that spider-silk lariats might be a good idea. Rein in that steer with spider power!

_ Samphire has recently become a fashionable vegetable and I’ve got to like it as a handy accompaniment to fish. Before its recent elevation it was known by most people for one thing only: the passage in King Lear that goes “Half-way down hangs one that gathers samphire; dreadful trade!” That’s halfway down Dover cliff. 

But for me, Samphire means one more thing: it was a poetry magazine of the 1970s and the first magazine of any kind to publish, in 1976, a piece of my writing. Samphire was a typical little poetry magazine of the 1980s. It was edited by Kemble Williams, who was based in Suffolk, and Professor Michael Butler, Professor of German Literature at Birmingham University. Like all little magazines, it had a coterie of writers but the range was wide and I don’t suppose I was the only writer to first-time in its pages. 

I gradually became a regular contributor and following a few poems I began to review for them. This was invaluable experience – I’m a reviewer to his day and Samphire is where I cut my teeth. It had endearing quirks, such as a rather high proportion of misprints: a review of George Barker that I was rather proud of was when printed seemed to be about one George Baker. 

Its three times a year arrival on the doormat was a major event – Samphire was a lifeline to a possible alternative world.

Of course, back then I romanticised the whole literary business and my small role in it to a ridiculous degree. On holiday one year in East Anglia I called on Kemble Williams at his home, Heronshaw, Holbrook. I remember little of the encounter except that it was good to see the office from which the magic magazine emanated. The magazine folded in 1983 after a 15 year run. The next year I set up shop as a full-time writer.

_ Origami is a metaphor for a certain kinds of folding operations which exist in nature and can be replicated in technology. In The Gecko’s Foot I devoted a chapter to the subject. New twists on this are coming to light. George Whitesides has recently been creating paper electronics, electronic circuits printed onto paper. Once the circuits are in place the paper can be folded by traditional origami techniques. So paper aeroplanes can now enter the electronic era, complete with LED lights.

Advanced Functional Materials, 2010, 20, 28-35. Download PDF

_ In Dazzled and Deceived, a key theme was the search for effective ships’ camouflage. It began with the eccentric American artist Abbott Thayer at the turn of the 20th century. Thayer had discovered the law of concealing coloration in nature in 1896 (ie animals are dark on top and pale below to counter glare and shadow and make the outline harder to pick out) and became obsessive in his attempts to convince the military to camouflage ships in the same way. He failed and died in despair in 1922

But in my research I discovered that the naturalist Peter Scott, a naval commander in WW2, had introduced a Thayer-like system of camouflage. He’d read Thayer as a boy, camouflaged his own ship in a freelance manner, and then convinced the Admiralty to adopt it as the Western Approaches colour scheme. The documentation was thin and I sought official confirmation in the National Archive and The Imperial War Museum archives.

Nothing could be found. Then I found a reference to a naval document – CB3098 – in David Williams’ Naval Camouflage 1914-1945. It seemed that the Admiralty had posthumously acknowledged Thayer after all. I had to get that report. But although the National Archives had the CB series, 3098 was missing.

As so often, the net came to the rescue. Bizarrely, it turned out that a Shropshire modellers’ cottage industry sold a facsimile of CB 3098 – The Camouflage of Ships at Sea – to enable modellers to paint their model ships in authentic colours.

The report did indeed vindicate Thayer. Given the crushing rejection he had received, the report’s conclusions are astonishing. How Thayer – long dead – would love to have heard these words: “…during the early part of the 1914-1918 war, a number of schemes for reducing the visibility of ships at sea were submitted to the Admiralty. …The soundest of these proposals, whose best points are incorporated in present-day camouflage practice, came from an American artist, Abbott H. Thayer, and from a  British biologist, Professor (now Sir John) Graham Kerr; both based their arguments primarily on their observations of the concealing colouration of wild animals and the two sets of proposals were to some extent complementary.”

What could have caused this amazing volute face? The report goes on to say that Thayer and Kerr’s argument that “white is the tone for concealment on an evenly overcast grey day – has been thoroughly vindicated in the present war by the Western Approaches, the scheme of camouflage designed by Lt-Cdr. Peter Scott, MOB’S.., R.N.V.R.” The suggestion is that Scott’s inside knowledge of naval operations helped him to carry conviction where the outsiders had failed. The report notes of Thayer and Scott: “it is interesting that the two men who arrived independently of each other, and at an interval of 25 years, at this same unorthodox conclusion should both have brought to the solution of the problem the imagination of an artist and the eye of a practised observer of nature”.

Thayer’s odyssey was convoluted in the extreme, as was the research trail in his wake.

 

_ You start to write a book because a subject has grown till it fills a book-sized space in your mind. Fine, but once you start you’re aware that there are many gaps in your knowledge. A book is forever, you hope, so you’d better fill those gaps. 

I became interested in mimicry over 25 years ago when I was editing natural history encyclopedias.There was just something uncanny about the idea of one creature impersonating another, especially when it was an animal trying to look like a plant. There’s a bug, Ityraea, that collects on twigs en masse and looks like a convincing flower spike until they all get up and drop off the twig; the leafy sea dragon has tattered appendages to its fins that exactly mimic the sea-weed it lives among; the Kallima butterfly has gorgeously rich purple and organ wings: when they’re open, that is; closed the underside is dead-leaf brown, complete with mouldy bits and holes and it even mimics the leaf stalk. 

But I didn’t want the book (now Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage) to be simply a catalogue of these stupendous creatures, one after another. The bible of the subject was Hugh Cott’s Adaptive Coloration in Animals and I knew that Cott had served as a camouflage officer in World War II, as had some painters. I wanted to see how camouflage and mimicry played out in human affairs as well as nature. Long before Velcro, camouflage was the first great bio-inspired technique. This wartime research took me to the National Archives at Kew and the Imperial War Museum, where I spent many happy hours.

The Desert War in North Africa in World War II began to fascinate me. Seeing reports in the archives, written on old typewriters in the desert, the files now slowly rotting in the archives was deeply thrilling. The Imperial War Museum has many accounts lodged by ordinary serving forces personnel and I combed these for accounts of the camouflage operation in North Africa. This of course was totally needle-in-haystack but I struck lucky. 

Reading the file of Sergeant Bob Thwaites, the camouflage school in the desert suddenly loomed into view. Thwaites had a very pithy take on forces life:

Our first acquaintance with our instructor was not encouraging. We had been told he was one of Britain’s most eminent naturalists and appeared to have been dragged protesting from a twitcher’s hide, bundled into a captain’s uniform made by a blind tailor and posted to Maadi.

This was vivid writing and, even better, this had to be my man, Hugh Cott, he was writing about:

 He was middle-aged, balding and with a military bearing suggesting that he could well have thought Sandhurst to be a seaside resort.

But, according to Thwaites, Cott won them over with an eye-opening list of camouflage tricks and insights including how to get your bearings from churches, why cowboy jackets are fringed and how many animals don’t just look like something else, they behave like it: such as the bittern which if disturbed sways like the reeds it is trying to emulate. For Thwaites it was an exercise in lateral thinking; for me it was manna from heaven.

The patterns we make as we criss-cross each other’s lives are infinite and most of them are hidden.  Go seek and you will find treasure.
 

 

 

_Having written about James Gordon it seems only right to mention the deep pioneer of biomimetics: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948). Thompson wasn’t looking for engineering solutions derived from nature but his explorations of mechanical principles in nature created the mindset that allowed biomimetics to flourish. There was a time lag of about three quarters of a century before his influence was felt but that wasn’t his fault.

Thompson saw that nature’s love affair with hexagons (bees’ honeycomb, skeletons of radiations, the Giant’s Causeway etc) was the result of nature following least stress, least material strategies in different contexts. In the case of the radiolarians it all derived from foams, with the minerals that formed the skeleton being deposited in the interstices of the foam. In the hands of scientists such as Geoffrey Ozin, this is now a recognised synthetic technique.

D’Arcy Thompson’s most influential passages don’t yet have any biomimetic applications but they are important in the science of biological form, evo devo, and nothing concerning form can be ruled out in biomimetics. Thompson showed how some body forms can be derived from others by systematic grid deformations. He showed for instance how a human skull can be morphed into a chimp’s or vice versa. The discovery of the hox genes in the 1980s provided a mechanism for Thompson’s transformations.

There is a strong link with Gordon in that Thomson analysed living structures in terms of stress, showing for instance the connection between the skeletons of large animals such as the bison and bridges. This proved an exciting inspiration for the London Eye architects Marks and Barfield, who in their early days conceived of a dinosaur bridge in which the span required only one anchor point, the bridge’s vertebral elements being held in tension and compression like a stegosaurus’ backbone. Reading D’Arcy Thompson you feel a world of possibility opening up. There is just one book, On Growth and Form, first published in 1917.My copy is the abridged edition, edited by John Tyler Bonner in 1961.

_ I’ve been re-reading James Gordon’s two Penguin books The New Science of Strong Materials and Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down. I can say that I’ve learnt more about the physical world from these two books than from any other source. Gordon was a British engineer and materials scientist who can claim to be the pioneer of biomimetics in Britain.

Gordon shows, with the confidence of an engineer who’d made materials for WW2 fighter planes but with a disarming irreverence, why it’s almost impossible to destroy a brick arch, why the comet airliner crashed, why ships still break in two, how to create superstore whiskers of glass, and countless others insights into our material world.

As the first biomimetician he counters the prejudice many engineers used to have against natural materials, showing how many natural materials exceed conventional engineering materials in their properties. Above all he explains the difference between strength, stiffness, toughness and elsaticity in the most vivid way possible. 

The great beauty of structural engineering is that that the whole subject can be explained in terms of two opposed concepts: compression and tension. The interrelationship between the two lies behind every structure, from the Parthenon to the London Eye. Once you grasp this, buildings and bridges never look the same again. As a rule of thumb, all buildings until the 19th century used compression only, but architects and engineers now increasingly favour tension structures, being lighter and potentially more elegant, hence those wonderful cable-stayed bridges.

Not only do you learn wonderful things from Gordon’s books, he writes so well, with a tone so intimate you feel he is talking just to you. He laces his text with stories from nature, the classical world (a passion of his), and his own rich experience of the triumphs and disasters of a life in engineering. They are books to re-read as you might want to read again any literary classic. They are literary classics.

 

_ In The Gecko’s Foot I went out on a limb for tensegrity. It was mostly a macro-scale architectural technique that derived from the innovative sculptures of Kenneth Snelson. But it does have a biomimetic angle: Donald Ingber, at Harvard, has shown how the cell uses tensegrity to maintain its shape.

Tensegrity structures are held together by tension elements. There are stiff rods but in a classic tensegrity these do not touch. They are quite simple to make and great fun. I couldn’t resist them for The Gecko’s Foot.

Tensegrity is now a very live area of nantechonological research thanks to more work at Harvard, developing tensegrity DNA structures. An editorial in Nature Nanotechnology (2010, 5, p. 473) stressed the links that can be made between macro and nano – tensegrity began with large sculptures but is now proving fruitful at the nanoscale. In this it is following the path that led from Buckminster Fuller’s architectural domes to the tiny C60 molecule named buckminsterfullerene in Fuller’s honour.

_ Everyone who writes a book hopes that long after the fuss and fret of producing it has gone the book will still working for them, out there, winning new readings and earning a bob or two without any further effort on the author’s part. That is the warm fantasy. In fact, most books have a short shelf life and go out of print.

So it’s a bonus when, having been more or less forgotten by the author, a book comes back into print, relaunched, with a new title and cover and new hope. OK, you know what’s coming next. Ten years ago I was a poetry animal 24/7: I edited Poetry Review, wrote reviews, compiled anthologies. Then I made the change and am now a full-on popular science creature. But, in a pleasant blast from the past – more zephyr with a hint of spring – one of the anthologies is about to re-enter the world of print (also on ebook).

The Picador Book of Wedding Poems is published on January 5. It was first published in 2004 and I had forgotten what many of my choices had been. It came up fresh for so I hope it might work for others too.

_ Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC, has attributed the fuss around Frozen Planet's use of zoo footage of polar bear cubs in what was supposed to be a wild setting to the Leveson enquiry into press standards. It seems far more likely to me to have been instigated by the global-warming denial lobby. David Attenborough is the most universally respected man in Britain and he has just made a powerful programme highlighting the consequences of global warming. He did not actually discuss the mechanism of global warming through human-generated carbon dioxide emissions but the programme was still seen as a threat by this lobby. Their methods are always the same: not to address the scientific evidence but to distract by dirty tricks, attacking by scurrilous means the people promulgating the arguments in favour of reducing fossil-fuel burning. There is no real problem with the polar bear footage. To put a camera into a bear’s den in its natural habitat would have endangered the cubs, when the whole point of the programme was to show how climate change threatens the survival of such creatures.

The really shocking story this week is Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol. At the moment the world seems hell-bent on conducting this experiment in global warming. And we are supposed to get irate because of a few seconds on footage in a zoo, rather than under the snowy wastes.