For this book, I interviewed many of the key practitioners of bio-inspiration and corresponded with many more. I am very grateful to those scientists, engineers and artists who made time to see me, answered my innumerable e-mail queries, made their illustrations available and checked facts in the typescript, especially Joanna Aizenberg, Steven Arcidiacono, Kellar Autumn, Julia Barfield, Wilhelm Barthlott, Angela Belcher, Paul Calvert, David Campbell, Tony Copeland, Charles Ellington, Ron Fearing, Robert Full, Andre Geim, Helen Ghiradella, Simon Hurst, Heinz Isler, David Kaplan, David Knight, Biruta Kresling, L Mahadevan, Stephen Mann, David Marks, George McDonald, Koryo Miura, Alex Parfitt, Tony Robbin, Kevin Sanderson, Mehmet Sarikaya, Kenneth Snelson, Julian Vincent, Christopher Viney, Pete Vukusic, Robin Wootton, and Rafal Żbikowski.
Many others helped with specific enquiries, especially Dietrich Bechert, Andrea Born, Yerev Braun, Reinhard Budde, Peter Butcher, John Chilton, Steve Chilton, Timothy Deming, Julian Ellis, Alastair Fowler, Laura Giuffrida, Simon Guest, Gordon Hendler, Donald Ingber, Holger Krapp, Randy Lewis, Adrian Marshall, Richard Milner, Carlo Montemagno, Dan Morse, Kenkichi Nose, Geoffrey Ozin, Anne Peattie, Sergio Pellegrino, Mieke van der Leeden, Fritz Vollrath, Binquing Wei, and Eli Yablonovitch.
Much of the research was carried out in the British Library at St Pancras, where pretty well all the world’s scientific papers, patents and general books can now be made available in one room. I am especially grateful to Tim Radford, Science Editor of the Guardian, for encouragement over many years and for commissioning me to write a series of articles on bio-inspiration from 2000–3; this research formed the platform for the book. The book could never have been published without the shaping hand in the early stages of my agent Andrew Lownie; I am grateful to my initial editors at Fourth Estate, Nick Davies and Christopher Potter who believed in the idea and took the book on. Mitzi Angel, who became the book’s editor at a crucial stage, had a powerful influence on the final shaping of the text. The book was completed during a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. I am grateful to the RLF and Queen Mary for easing the burden. My partner, Diana Reich, heroically read the entire text and steered me away from many a textual blind alley.
For permission to reproduce extracts, I am grateful to the following: to Random House Group Ltd for an extract from Silk by Alessandro Baricco, translated by Guido Waldman (Harvill Press, 1997). Used by permission of the Random House Group; to the Wylie Agency Inc. for an extract from Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino (Jonathan Cape, 1992) © 1992 by Italo Calvino, reprinted by permission of the Wylie Agency Inc.; to Thomson Publishing Services for an extract from Adaptive Coloration in Animals by HB Cott (Oxford University Press, 1940); to Liveright Publishing Corporation for an extract from The Bridge by Hart Crane (Liveright, 1992); to HarperCollins Publishers Ltd for an extract from Prey by Michael Crichton (HarperCollins, 2002) © 2002 Michael Crichton; to Chris Phoenix and Eric Drexler for an extract from ‘Safe exponential manufacturing’ by Eric Drexler and Chris Phoenix from Nanotechnology, 15, 2004; to California Institute of Technology for an extract from ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’, by Richard Feynman, from Engineering and Science, vol. 23, no. 5, February 1960, pp. 22–36; to Helen Ghiradella for an extract from ‘Light and Color on the Wing’, Applied Optics, vol. 30, no. 24, 1991; to David Higham Associates for an extract from The Third Man by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1976); to HarperCollins Publishers for an extract from The Open Sea: The World of Plankton by Sir Alistair Hardy (Collins, 1956) ©1956 Sir Alistair Hardy; to Faber & Faber for an extract from ‘Ten Glosses – 3. The Bridge’ from Electric Light by Seamus Heaney (Faber, 2001); to Bloodaxe Books Ltd for an extract from ‘Brief reflection on cats growing in trees’, by Miroslav Holub, translated by Ewald Osers, from Poems: Before & After: Collected English Translations (Bloodaxe, 1990); to Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group for extracts from Other People’s Trades by Primo Levi (Simon & Schuster, 1989), translated by Raymond Rosenthal, Copyright © 1989 by Simon & Schuster. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group. All rights reserved; to Indiana University Press for an extract from Lucretius: The Way Things Are, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Indiana University Press, 1969); to Random House Inc. for an extract from Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, translated by John E Woods (Vintage, 1999); to HarperCollins Publishers for an extract from ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ by Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks, from Modern Russian Poetry (MacGibbon & Kee, 1966); to Seren Books for an extract from ‘Bumblebees and the Scientific Method’, from Id’s Hospit by Sheenagh Pugh (Seren Books, 1997); to Bloodaxe Books Ltd for an extract from ‘The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument’ by Anne Stevenson, from The Collected Poems 1955–1995 (Bloodaxe, 2000); to The MIT Press for an extract from The Simple Science of Flight by Henk Tennekes (MIT Press, 1996); to Cambridge University Press for extracts from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, abridged edition, edited by JT Bonner (Cambridge University Press, 1961); to Oxford University Press for an extract from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the scholar-naturalist, 1860–1948, by Ruth D’Arcy Thompson (OUP, 1958). By permission of Oxford University Press; to The Consumers’ Association for an extract from Which?, June 2003.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders of the extracts published in this book. The author and publishers apologize if any material has been included without permission or without the appropriate acknowledgment, and would be glad to be told of anyone who has not been consulted.