Jay Harman > Quotes

“Leaves are also teaching scientists about more effective capture of wind energy. Wind energy offers great promise, but current turbines are most effective when they have very long blades (even a football field long). These massive structures are expensive, hard to build, and too often difficult to position near cities. Those same blades sweep past a turbine tower with a distinctive thwacking sound, so bothersome that it discourages people from having wind turbines in their neighborhoods. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also estimates that hundreds of thousands of birds and bats are killed each year by the rotating blades of conventional wind turbines. Instead, inspired by the way leaves on trees and bushes shake when wind passes through them, engineers at Cornell University have created vibro-wind. Their device harnesses wind energy through the motion of a panel of twenty-five foam blocks that vibrate in even a gentle breeze. Although real leaves don't generate electrical energy, they capture kinetic energy. Similarly, the motion of vibro-wind's "leaves" captures kinetic energy, which is used to excite piezoelectric cells that then emit electricity. A panel of vibro-wind leaves offers great potential for broadly distributed, low noise, low-cost energy generation.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“The herb ephedra has been used in China and India for five thousand years as a stimulant for cold and flu sufferers. Later known as Mormon tea, ephedra is now synthesized as pseudoephedrine and is found in many marketed cold remedies. (Unfortunately, it's also a key ingredient in the illicit manufacture of highly addictive and destructive methamphetamine.) Quinine, from the bark of the rain forest tree, Cinchona ledgeriana, is an effective preventive to malaria, one of the greatest killers of humanity, with up to one million deaths per year. The heart drug, dioxin, is synthesized from the foxglove flower. Aspirin's principle ingredients were recognized in willow bark by Hippocrates around 400 BCE. It was named and marketed by Bayer in 1899 and is still one of the biggest selling drugs in the world.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, Saga University in Japan, and the University of California, Davis, proposed creating an artificial inorganic leaf modeled on the real thing. They took a leaf of Anemone vitifolia, a plant native to China, and injected its veins with titanium dioxide-a well-known industrial photocatalyst. By taking on the precise branching shape and structure of the leaf's veins, the titanium dioxide produced much higher light-harvesting ability than if ti was used in a traditional configuration. The researchers found an astounding 800 percent increase in hydrogen production as well. The total performance was 300 percent more active than the world's best commercial photocatalysts. When they added platinum nanoparticles to the mix, it increased activity by a further 1,000 percent.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Future profits come to those who anticipate trends and work toward meeting them with services or products. In this case, the trend is clear. Biomimicry has always been a great source of wealth and opportunity. Now it can be a far greater wealth generator and problem solver than ever before. Most opportunities are still waiting to be identified or marketed, so the potential for intellectual property creation, new manufacturing methods, and breakthrough chemicals and materials is immense. Nothing short of the overhaul of the entire industrial sector is possible.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“The human heart weighs ten ounces and pumps blood through sixty thousand miles of veins and arteries. The humpback whale's two-thousand-pound heart effectively pumps enough blood to fill a small swimming pool, through forty-five hundred times as many veins and arteries as humans-with as few as "three or four beats a minute" at times.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“I asked Brent if he had any tips for other aspiring entrepreneurs. "Do something that has significance," he replied, "something that makes a difference and that you have passion for. Second, successful entrepreneurs are the ones who follow through. As Winston Churchill said, 'Never, never, never, give up.' Third, don't set goals too high. Fourth, do it without raising lots of capital. Fifth, stay focused. Sixth, every quarter, make an operating plan, and stick to it.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“More than 200 billion was invested in sustainable businesses worldwide in 2010-a 40 percent increase from 2009-even as many other sectors sagged in the worst recession in eighty years. Biomimicry is sometimes described as a discipline of sustainable engineering, but any truly sustainable product or business is inherently biomimetic. Biomimicry creates products based on nature's peak achievers-all of whom are sustainable.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“The shell of the scaly foot possesses a number of additional energy-dissipation features compared to typical mollusk shells that are primarily composed of calcium carbonate." The industrial opportunities already anticipated include superior helmets, protective armor, and new structural materials. Pyrites and gregite are also cheap being evaluated as an alternative to silicone for the creation of cheap, abundant solar cells.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“The lotus is one of the most commercially successful sources of inspiration for biomimetic products. Apart from their intoxicating, heavenly fragrance, lotus plants are a symbol of purity in some major religions. More than two thousand years ago, for example, the Bhagavad Gita, one of India's ancient sacred scriptures, referred to lotus leaves as self-cleaning, but it wasn't until the late 1960s that engineers with access to high-powered microscopes began to understand the mechanism underlying the lotus' dirt-free surface. German scientist Dr. Wilhelm Barthlott continued this research, finding microstructures on the surface of a lotus leaf that cause water droplets to bead up and roll away particles of mud or dirt. Like many biomimics, this insight came quickly, while its commercialization took many years more. The "Lotus Effect"-short for the superhydrophobic (water-repelling) quality of the lotus leaf's micro to nanostructured surface-has become the subject of more than one hundred related patents and is one of the premier examples of successfully commercialized biomimicry.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Biomimicry offers the opportunity to meet our resource needs and to reinvent almost every industry on earth. But as we all learned in school, an object at rest wants to stay at rest, and an object in motion doesn't like to stop or change direction. Like all engineers who must deal with those two fundamental laws of physics (as yet still proven), innovators must cope with this corollary to our survival instinct: resistance to change and the resulting inertia created by systems and institutions that are already in place. The trick is to find the path of least resistance. All it takes is for each of us to be willing to recognize our human nature and take ourselves in hand. We are voting every day by our action or our inaction, by what we buy and what we talk about. Whether by supporting biomimicry education in our schools, speaking up for a biomimetic project or practice in our businesses, showing up for a city council meeting on sustainability, or researching the products we buy, each of us can be a tremendously powerful force for positive change.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Bio-inspired products often see annual doubling in sales when they enter the market. They offer customers better performance, reduced energy requirements, less waste, and less toxicity, while being sold at prices competitive with existing products.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“A friend who lives in Micronesia told me that the inhabitants of one of the islands of Polynesia were given refrigerators by a group of visiting, well-intentioned missionaries. They had noticed that the locals, who were subsistence fishermen, had to fish every day because any excess catch spoiled in the tropical heat. The missionaries thought it would be a blessing if excess fish could be refrigerated, allowing the fishermen to put their attention to other wealth-generating activities. On a return visit a year later, the missionaries noticed that there was no trace of the refrigerators in the community. Their inquiries informed them that the elders had ordered all the equipment dumped in the ocean. The reason? Refrigerating excess fish meant that surplus was no longer given to the elderly or infirm, as had been their custom for a thousand years. It was unacceptable to the tribe that "progress" resulted in more wealth for some and hunger for others.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“We clear-cut forests and destroy entire habitats to produce paper when superior, cheaper, and far less destructive bamboo alternatives are available.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Coral is built by trillions of tiny organisms called polyps that extract magnesium, calcium, and carbon from ocean water to build a community of skeletons. In a similar way, Calera, which Brent founded in 2007, creates cement by running carbon dioxide from flue gas from a nearby power plant through water containing calcium, magnesium, sodium, and chloride-such as seawater. This combination of chemicals and minerals also converts the carbon dioxide in the flue gas to related materials called carbonates, which are heavier and precipitate out of the salt water. After removing the water and drying, the product is ready for use as cement. In effect, the company makes chalk, and indeed, Calera's cement is bright white. As a side benefit, the source water has had its salt removed and can be purified to fresh water with only a few additional steps. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, rather than giving off carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, Calera's process absorbs half a ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of cement it produces.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“As a boy, I had the privilege of realizing that nature only moves and grows in precise, turbulent, spiraling flows. As an adult, I learned that human technology, in the main, tries to suppress turbulence. Nature doesn't waste the opportunity. It exploits the energy that is rolled up in turbulence. Birds, insects, fish, and the human heart clearly demonstrate the advantage of this strategy. Humans insist on traveling in straight lines and guzzle energy. Nature travels in spirals and sips energy. Truly grasping the significance of this simple fact throws open the door to reinventing the industrial world and gives us the tools to rescue our ailing planet, populations, and economy. By adapting and applying nature's spiraling geometries, I am confident that we can halve the world's energy consumption-without sacrifice.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“The greatest wealth and satisfaction of our desires lies not in clear-cutting forests, stripping the oceans, or spewing billions of tons of toxins into the atmosphere but within the forces of nature's wild movement and growth. Nature is the mother of all invention and many of humankind's greatest achievements have been made by copying nature. However, our copies have been rough. We haven't succeeded in mimicking nature's grace, efficiency-and most importantly-sustainability. We're coloring outside the lines and making a mess. Let's look again, using nature as our model as the earliest humans did, but aided by the tools of science.

With nature, it's never too late. Nature is a survivor. Nature never gives up. She heals all wounds. Nature pushes up tiny little blades of grass through city concrete and asphalt and overgrows Mayan cities. She keeps putting out billions of seeds, spores, and baby spiders, growing mountains, evolving new species. She is always creating. It's not just okay to feel optimistic, it's natural, and essential. Combining our human intelligence with optimism is the best way we can give back to our earth. Right now, across the globe, we humans, the products of nature, have the skills and the technology to solve just about any problem we're facing, without sacrifice-if the will is there. There is a way, if we allow ourselves to be guided by nature's optimism and nature's wisdom.

We can do it.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“From the Greek bios, meaning "life," and mimesis, "to imitate," the term biomimicry was first coined in 1997 by Janine Benyus, the gifted naturalist, educator, and author of the landmark book Biomimicry. But biomimicry isn't new. Humans have copied nature for millenia, with varying degrees of accuracy and understanding.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Stephen Dewar, vice president of operations, cofounded WhalePower with Frank Fish, Bill Bateman and Phil Watts. I've known Stephen for several years and have watched with interest the challenges faced by the company since it was incorporated. I recently asked him if he had advice for aspiring biomimicry entrepreneurs. His number one message: Have a clear vision of why you're taking on your project and where you want to go. Then, like nature, be flexible and adaptable. his staff even made T-shirts that quote one of his favorite sayings: "For every vision, there is an equal and opposite revision." Second: Do your homework. Be deeply interested in the science, so you can clearly differentiate what's not just a good biomimetic idea but one for which there is a strong market demand.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Biomimicry is not just design that imitates or copies nature. It's design that asks the right questions in order to understand the mechanisms in nature's cornucopia of solutions, then uses that understanding to remedy problems-without creating new ones. You can start with an observation in nature and apply it, or start with a technological need and find a champion adapter in nature.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Our deeply troubled world can be reinvented through biomimicry. Nature's trillions of solutions throw open the door to far-reaching opportunities for building a better world; rescuing our ailing environment and atmosphere; and giving rise to a powerful, new, sustainable economy. To quote rock musician Tom Petty, "The future ain't what it used to be." No matter who you are, you can be a pioneer and leader in creating a new golden age on earth. A sweet twenty-first century and a third millennium are possible.

Imagine.

It's your life, your world, your opportunity, and your responsibility.

The possibilities are endless.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“The real issue, according to Brent, is a combination of cynicism and outright hostility from the status quo, which is quite typical with new paradigm-changing technologies, and the efficacy or otherwise of management, funders, and commercialization tactics. "The biggest obstacles we face in this world are doubt and greed," says Brent. "The world needs this technology. It's whether it happens now or in thirty years. It's just a matter of time before we're faithfully copying nature and creating benign cement.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Spiral shapes weave through everything. Magnetic fields are arranged in spirals. Mushroom spores propagate in spirals. And no matter what our race or religion, size or shape, we humans are made of the same all-pervading spiral geometry. This is very apparent in the swirling shape of heart muscles and skin pores.”
― Jay Harman

“Pharmaceuticals are essentially biomimetic in principle, but are not often designed to have no side effects. Drugs were historically created from natural substances; the word drug comes from the Dutch droog, meaning "dried plant." As evidenced in Neanderthal archaeological digs, natural medicines have been in use for more than sixty thousand years. Excavations have revealed the use of at least seven herbal remedies that still show proven therapeutic value, including ephedra (as a cold remedy), hollyhock (poor man's aspirin), and yarrow (wound dressing).”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“The whole known universe is made of and according to nature's spiraling geometries-and nature uses them exclusively to move energy.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Leonardo da Vinci was perhaps the greatest biomimic of all time. Not only did he precisely adhere to nature's proportions in his art but also spent the last ten years of his life studying-even obsessing over-the geometry and motions of natural flow. Based on years of observing birds in flight, Leonardo, the world's first fluid dynamicist, designed flying wings, a helicopter, and numerous other machines. His understanding of how the human heart actually operates-through manipulation of whirlpools-has only been rediscovered in the past decade. Even five hundred years later, the depth of Leonardo's insights into the secrets of nature's form and function cause scientists to marvel.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“The cochlea of all mammals matches the spiraling design of a seashell, while the shape of our outer ears echoes the curled-up embryos of humans and many other animals-a feature utilized by acupuncturists who treat ailments in various body parts by pinning needles into the location on the ear that corresponds to those body parts.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“If indigenous peoples have a sense of "enough," what has happened with the rest of humanity? Many of us in the developed world have tamed and caged and bored ourselves. Like animals domesticated for use, we have become fat and unhealthy. With more than half of us living in urban areas, we've largely lost our connection to nature and the historic initiation rites that oriented us to our place in the cycle of life. Instead, we distract ourselves with everything from shopping to stimulants to video games.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Pythagoras, in particular, was fascinated by the geometric proportions found throughout the natural world. Before Pythagoras, there is little evidence that musicians tuned their instruments using any particular system or scales. It's understood that Pythagoras experimented with a monochord, a single-stringed instrument with a moving bridge, to identify the way that plucking a string of various lengths creates particular musical notes. The proportions that he identified to be most harmonious happened to match the proportions of animal and plant growth (which we'll investigate later in this book). His observations were the foundation of the Western scale of music. This is a great example of isolating natural elements and combining them into a new art from. So magical seeming were his discoveries to conservative authorities that he feared for his life and started a secret society to study nature's mysteries more deeply.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“In fact, a dolphin's whistles, pulses, and clicks, made by air sacs just below its blowhole, are among the loudest noised made by marine animals. A scientist at Penn State's Center for Information and Communications Technology Research has been analyzing these underwater messages not for meaning but for hints on how to make our wireless signals more effective. As the Ask Nature database describes, Dr. Mohsen Kavehrad uses "multirate, ultrashort laser pulses, or wavelets, that mimic dolphin chirps, to make optical wireless signals that can better penetrate fog, clouds, and other adverse weather conditions." The multiburst quality of dolphin sounds "increases the chances that a signal will get past obstacles" in the surrounding water. In the same way, Dr. Kavehrad's simulated dolphin chirps increase the odds of getting around such tiny obstacles as droplets of fog or rain. This strategy could expand the capability of optical bandwidth to carry even greater amounts of information. Such an application technology could optimize communication between aircraft and military vehicles, hospital wards, school campus buildings, emergency response teams, and citywide networks.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation

“Dayna emphasized that the main challenge for companies deciding whether to adopt biomimetic solutions hinges on value generation. Profit is usually the only metric that is used, and while she recognizes the tremendous potential for profit offered by biomimicry, she stressed that there are also highly valuable, albeit less easily measured, benefits for companies that adopt biomimicry into their practices. Employees see real purpose and personal mission in their work. It creates passion, loyalty, creativity, and team building. Biomimetic product development starts from a nontoxic, nonharmful stance. Rather than designing for end effect and then compensating for toxicity and waste management, it also saves adopters considerable money on increasingly arduous and expensive environmental regulations-and future remediation liability.”
― Jay Harman, The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation