Science: The Infant Science

Sciences, like animals, can reproduce when placed together under the proper circumstances. In Dayton, at a symposium sponsored by the Air Force, an infant science born of biology and electronics has made its appearance. Its name: bionics. Its aim: to study living creatures in hope of gaining knowledge to improve man-made mechanisms.

Perhaps the best description of bionics came from Biologist Harvey E. Savely, head of life sciences for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. “Our technology,” he said, “is faced with problems of increasing complexity. In the living things we see around us, problems of organized complexity have been solved with a success that invites our wonder and interest. It is natural, therefore, that we look to these successful inventions in nature for clues for new classes of man-made machines with greatly increased capabilities.”

Snakes & Fish. Savely pointed out that nature is full of marvelously sensitive instruments. Rattlesnakes, for instance, find warm prey at night by means of heat-detecting organs that respond to a temperature change of one-thousandth of a degree. No man-made heat seeker can do anything like it. Neither can man-made gadgets approach the electronic virtuosity of those tropical fish that send out pulsed currents of electricity, presumably to keep them in touch with things around them. The system they use is not well understood, but it is known that one kind of fish can detect a current of two one-hundred-billionths of an ampere per square centimeter of its body. Its electronic sensing permits it to discriminate between glass rods in its tank that differ in diameter by less than one-tenth of an inch. Study of these talented fish could pay off richly in electronic ideas.

Study of the eyes of beetles is already paying off. A group of scientists at Tübingen, Germany, found that a beetle’s compound eyes can measure the speed of a moving background with random shadings on it. After finding out how the beetles do it, the scientists set to work building an instrument on the same principle to measure the ground speed of airplanes. It didn’t need all of the compound eye, only two facets of it simulated by photocells watching the ground from the nose and tail of the plane.

Bats v. Moths. Bats, owls and porpoises all navigate or find their prey by sonic devices that are much more delicate and effective than anything man can build. More delicate still is the microscopic ear of a kind of moth that is often a prey of bats. It is tuned to the ultrasonic squeaks that bats send out, so the moth can take evasive action if a bat comes close. Biologists have already used this marvelous instrument. When electrodes are attached to its nerve, it makes the best known microphone for listening to bats.

Insect chemical detectors (sense of smell) are amazingly good too. Among the best are those of male moths that can smell a female of their own species a long distance away, apparently detecting a single molecule of a specific chemical. Human chemists cannot do this, even with the most subtle laboratory apparatus.

Even more important are the devices by which living creatures make use of information from their senses and store it for future use. Scientists have known for years that brains, human and animal, are efficient computers of enormous complexity. Like up-to-date man-made computers they turn information that comes from the senses into digital (numerical) code for transmission along the nerves. Deep in the brain itself the digital code is converted into analogue (quantitative) code for mixing with other information. Said Savely: “Here we come up against organized complexity carried to unimaginable extremes. The evolutionary culmination of this process is the human brain, which has become ‘nature conscious of itself.’ ” Scientists know only vaguely how brains work, but as they learn more, their respect for brains increases.

Another remarkable thing about living organisms is their ability to store in the nucleus of a single microscopic cell all the genetic information that makes that cell develop into a vastly complicated creature such as a fish, a bird or a man. Dr. Savely does not expect that those deep mysteries will be solved soon, but he is sure that study of them by physicists, chemists and mathematicians, as well as by biologists, will add enormously to the power of scientific man.