Bionics (1978)

[Music] it's a whole science the study of Life systems in order to design art artificial systems that copy them life systems have solved some very sophisticated technical problems for example for a long time we envied the flight of birds eventually we were able to make a few gadgets that could stay in the air for a while and after a long study of the gliding ability of birds we were able to understand some of the principles of aerodynamics and finally construct our own Birds that's bionics part biology part [Music] engineering a more recent example was the invention of the analog computer a feat made possible by a careful study of how the human brain operates here's another example think of a barking dog chasing an unfortunate cat the excitement and activity makes the dog's heartbeat faster the heartbeat is regulated by a natural pacemaker a highly modified portion of the cardiac muscle it tells every part of the heart when to beat and how fast if necessary this can be replaced by an artificial pacemaker a mechanical Gadget implanted in the body to provide a constant heartbeat but there is one problem when the body is exerted the heart has to beat faster in other words our artificial pacemaker has to be able to change its beat if it can't the heart gets overworked and stops by combining our knowledge of biology with our expertise in engineering we now have artificial pacemakers which can speed up and slow down so the heart can function almost as well as normal today we're able to replace a dazzling number of parts in the human body with bionic parts and we're doing this by studying life systems when we're studying is the porpus somehow wounds on porpuses heal without leaving any scar by studying how nature does it we hope to someday perform surgery and heal the human body without leaving any scars at all it is a curious fact that some lizards can grow new Tails we hope to duplicate that natural ability so that people who lose arms or legs will be able to grow new ones the study of bionics has revealed a fundamental and very useful difference in the needs of living things and artificial mechanisms all living things need our environment to survive air water food on the other hand manufactured objects don't fare well in the environment they rust and break [Music] down if a living thing be it a plant or an animal is isolated from its environment it dies on the contrary artificial mechanisms aren't limited to our environment they can be designed to work in a vacuum this fact has enormous implications for our future in space form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of in space which is a vacuum we are like fish out of water our machines though are right at home it's no accident that the first landing on the moon was not by a person but by a machine surveyor 1 the first landing on Mars was by a stationary robot biking [Applause] [Music] one if you can't beat the machine join it this is a projected creature of the future the B IC person half human half artificial Parts a human machine at home in [Applause] [Music] space this is a clock and this is an egg a fertilized chicken egg the clock runs the egg lives the clock is a mechanism the egg is an organism a living thing the clock is made of 100 6 Parts the egg is just one cell yet no one has ever made anything as complex as a cell from the plan we can make the clock but try as we may we cannot make the egg yet we can put together a clock in 21 minutes because we have the plan the egg can put together a chicken in 21 days but we don't know that plan all it takes is the plan it's a problem of bionics the plan for the clock exists in the minds of humans the plan for the chicken exists in the mind of nature this kind of thinking has convinced some biologists and Engineers that some of the same principles we use to put together mechanical devices can be applied to life itself to learn Nature's plan and duplicate it to create life however a chick is created and grows automatically from a hen and a rooster it's an entirely different [Music] problem when a rich American bought a castle in England he numbered each brick and put the order on a blueprint then he took the castle completely apart and moved the whole rock pile to the United States there using his blueprint he recreated the castle Brick by Brick the castle ghost had to get there by [Music] himself if the castle had been a living thing though the American would have needed only one brick because the plans for the whole castle would be in every brick across the Atlantic in America the brick would automatically reproduce itself and give the castle plans to every new brick the castle would grow out of the instructions even the ghost would be in the pl for years we've known that the instructions for living things are contained in genes what we didn't know is how the genes are made now we do the plan is contained in a giant molecule called DNA the arrangement of elements in this molecule determines what the living thing will be already we've made artificial genes for two organisms a bacterium and the rabbit and we're trying to make human jeans until the present Nature has controlled Evolution one day an animal came who may change all of that The Thinker the one who doesn't like things the way they [Music] [Music] [Music] are the Magnificent Famer of Fire who's Afraid of the Dark in the past we could only tame nature soon we'll be able to change nature to artificially change the genetic blueprint of any human to create the exact kind of people we want to direct our own evolution but what kind of people do we want it will be an awesome power all over the world are scientists who fear what we may do with this new knowledge and they'd like to limit further research others though think we'll muddle through just as we always have the writer George Bernard Shaw was once asked by a beautiful woman why don't we get married what marvelous children we'd have with your brains and my [Music] beauty that would be fine he replied but what if they inherit my beauty and your brains [Music] w [Music] [Applause] [Music]