The Gecko's Foot - Bio-inspiration engineered from Nature by Peter Forbes

4th Estate

Reviewed by RITA CARTER

This review first appeared in The Daily Mail

IT'S A WELL KNOWN SCIENTIFIC FACT that bumble bees can’t fly. The lift that can be achieved by their stunted wings just isn’t enough to float them.

Unaware of this, natural selection found a way around the aerodynamic obstacle aeons before humans put helicopters in the sky, and nature still boasts countless inventions that man-made technology can’t match. There is, for example, the lotus that repels dirt from its surface, the  sparkling “blue” butterfly that has no blue pigment in its wings; and the eponymous gecko which can run effortlessly across a ceiling.

You would think that adapting these wonders for our own use – stay-clean fabrics, novel paints, Spiderman feats of adhesion – would be easy. Given that evolution has already done the inventing, it should just be a matter of observing how, and copying. In fact, we have been surprisingly slow to use Nature’s patent-book, and it is only now that “bio-inspiration” is really taking off.

One reason for this is that much of nature’s cleverest work has been hidden from us until recently, because it happens in nano-world – a place where objects are between one millionth and one billionth of a metre in size. The problem with observing things on this scale is not just that they are so small , it is that light waves themselves are nano-sized, and when they hit another object of similar dimension they bounce off in a way that blurs the picture. This distortion meant that, until the invention of  X-rays and electron microscopes, we were stuck with a massive (in nano-terms) “Blind Zone”.

Take the gecko’s foot of the title: look at it with your naked eye and you see some elastic bands of tissue. Look through an ordinary microscope and you will detect some sort of bristly structure on them. Neither explain its ability to stand upside down on sheer glass. Through an electron microscope, however, the bristles can be seen to have split ends which are so small that they actually merge with the molecules they touch. This creates an adhesive force so strong that, were it to use all its bristles at once, a gecko’s foot could support the weight of an adult person.

Another reason for our failure to learn more from nature, according to Forbes, is that for a long time scientists concentrated, using chemistry, on getting down to the itsy-bitsiest pieces of matter, rather than studying their complex connections and interplay. 

© Rita Carter 2007 - www.ritacarter.co.uk