Bio-inspired materials: unnatural life.

A t the turn of the nineteenth century, Pieter Harting and George Rainey laid the foundations of a science called “synthetic morphology”1. The inspiration for the name probably came from Wöhler’s discovery of urea synthesis in 1828, a breakthrough commonly perceived to mark the beginning of synthetic organic chemistry. The primary goal of Harting and Rainey’s synthetic morphology was to explain and artificially imitate the formation of inorganic structures associated with living matter, such as those found in diatoms, pearls or butterfly wings. But, what has become of Harting and Riney’s synthetic vision today? Indeed, the questions initially stirred by the aesthetics of shells, feathers and scales are far from being answered and have expanded in many directions that promise to affect how we harvest energy, carry out reactions and study biological function. Whereas emphasis has changed from the early days of playful explorations, the original awe inspired by biological organization was vividly present at the symposium on ‘Biomolecular and Biologically Inspired Interfaces and Assemblies’ at the 2007 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston. DNA and proteins are known in traditional biochemistry as informational macromolecules because the order of their subunits (nucleotides in nucleic acids and amino acids in proteins) is The biologically inspired toolbox is well and truly open. From three-dimensional DNA assemblies to active catalysts inside the confines of a virus — biomolecules are finding a second, unnatural life. mAteriAl witNeSS