Originally Aired 5/6/12

After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world is what has succeeded. 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.
In January 2009, Harvard received the largest philanthropic gift in its history -- $125M -- to create the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and today's guest is its founding director, DON INGBER. Our bodies - and all living systems - accomplish tasks far more sophisticated and dynamic than any entity yet designed by humans. By emulating nature's principles for self-organizing and self-regulating, Wyss researchers develop innovative engineering solutions for healthcare, energy, architecture, robotics, and manufacturing.