Burgling Nature's Vault

My ears pricked up when I heard Dave Snowden declare at Monday's KM Australia 2007 that knowledge management's role was to improve decision making and help create an environment for innovation. Sometimes the simple understanding that a material has been created once gives us a direction to focus our quest for innovation. Increasingly, our knowledge about the natural world is shaping our definition of innovation. Take the biologists from the University of California - Riverside who have sequenced the genes for two proteins in the "dragline silk" of the black widow spider. Now "dragline silk" is the bee's knees of spidy silk, combining extraordinary strength and amazing toughness. The military, industry and medical fraternity all lust after its properties. Question is, does synthesising nature represent true innovation or just simple mimickery? Is the knowledge of how a black widow spider exudes a gooey protein stream which interacts as they are forced through its spinneret before aligning precisely to form stands of high tensile silk more innovative than knowing how to how transform spider silk into body armour, clothing, microsutures and rope? Over at the University of Sheffield, chemists have created "plastic" blood. The artificial blood is made from plastic molecules. Like our haemoglobin it has an iron atom at its core that binds with oxygen to transport it around the body. Unlike "real" blood, being plastic it is light and easy to store. It can be concentrated into a paste then dissolved in water - making it easier to transport. It also doesn't need refrigeration and has a longer life at room temperature - donated blood generally has only a 35 day shelf life. It's an elegant solution built on our accumulated knowledge about how blood chemistry functions. Maybe Dave is right about knowledge being a precursor to innovation.  http://www.newsroom.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=1612   http://www.shef.ac.uk/mediacentre/2007/808.html   Image: Female black widow spider (Latrodectus hesperus) walking on silk web, Female black widow spider with her dragline silk, Mark Chappell, University of California - Riverside, Artificial blood, University of Sheffield

Comments

[Souptrow]

How do you do...
http://assolt.com
Very good contents...
I Will be back!