Biology and Materials? Part I
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th the goal of producing novel materials with important, unique, and useful properties. What does biology bring the materials sciences? Unlike the pharmaceutical industry, which sees a very bright future in the discovery of more naturally occurring drugs, the materials community has, in all likelihood, few remaining discoveries of usable biological materials. The emphasis clearly must be on new materials and enhancement of properties. Here, however, the evolutionists ask challenging questions. Nature, they say, has had hundreds of millions of years to perfect biological molecules and structures and optimize them for function. What could a few scientists do to improve on these, and within the time frame of an annual (quarterly) business report or a grant renewal? Initial studies say that quite a lot can be done to improve on Nature's materials. For one, it appears that many biological systems are not optimized, but simply made "good enough." Simple experiments using tools readily available to living organisms have, for example, led to improvements in the stability and activity of enzymes. Further, biological materials are produced under a very narrow set of conditions. They are synthesized only from those elements that are readily available to a living organism, not toxic to it and readily absorbed by it. Synthetic routes are selected only if they do not involve toxic intermediates and the products made must be deliverable to their site of use. There is, in fact, much that can be improved upon, especially once the synthetic processes are taken out of the organisms and put into the laboratory. Biology and chemistry have opened a
door to this field and the view is promising. Biomaterials is now (at least in the view of its practitioners) one of the most exciting and productive fields of endeavor. It is a new field, however, and there are as yet few true successes. This issue of the MRS Bulletin, and also the next, have been designed to provide a survey of some of the exciting questions in the field and examples of some of the research efforts that are being pursued. Even two such issues allow too little space for a complete view, but it is hoped at least a flavor of what is being done can be conveyed. We have chosen to address four major areas of biomaterials: • biomineralization, • proteins as materials, • enzymes as synthetic tools, and • materials modeled on self-assembling membranes. The first two will be addressed in this issue, the next two in the November issue. The discussion of each area begins with a paper describing the current state of knowledge of a relevant biological system, specifically eggshells, silks, natural "plastics," and biological membranes. This description of a natural system is followed by one or two papers presenting work focused on applying what is known about that system to the synthesis of novel, artificial materials. In addition, we have included one or two papers describing new materials modeled on biology that do not fit cleanly into any of the four major areas. The preliminary status
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