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“The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. Like the viceroy butterfly imitating the monarch, we humans are imitating the best adapted organisms in our habitat. We are learning, for instance, how to harness energy like a leaf, grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, self-medicate like a chimp, create color like a peacock, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest.”

A more recent example of biomimetics in action is a biological laser created by two physicists at Harvard Medical School. Malte Gather and Seok Hyun Yun placed a single cell, genetically engineered to produce green fluorescent proteins originally found in jellyfish, into a cavity with two parallel mirrors on either side. When they exposed the cell to pulses of light, it emitted green fluorescent light that focused into a laser beam with the aid of the parallel mirrors. As Gather and Yun pointed out in their paper, the single-cell biological laser avoids the use of “artificial or engineered optical gain materials, such as doped crystals, semiconductors, synthetic dyes and purified gases.”