Biomimicry, or engineering based on naturally occurring principles, is one of the newest emerging technologies in patent law.
The Biomimicry Guild states,
Life has been performing design experiments on Earth’s R&D lab for 3.8 billion years. What’s flourishing on the planet today are the best ideas—those that perform well in context, while economizing on energy and materials. Whatever your company’s design challenge, the odds are high that one or more of the world’s 30 million creatures has not only faced the same challenge, but has evolved effective strategies to solve it.
Time magazine explains further,
Some 3.8 billion years of evolution have exposed the design flaws of roughly 99% of nature’s creations — all recalled by the Manufacturer. The 1% that have survived can teach powerful lessons about how things should be built if they’re to last.
American Way shares a story on some of the developments in this field based on naturally occurring technology, which include:
- self-cleaning paint based on flowers
- Spider-Man velcro emulating geckos
- clothing dyes as vibrant as a peacock
- hydrodynamic swimsuits from sharks
- “cool” architecture copying termite mounds
- more energy efficient equipment
- quiter airplanes using owl feathers
Of course the issue raised is who gets to patent designs naturally occurring in the environment.
But none of these technologies are exact replicas, and do require research and development to emulate and generate synthetic duplicates, and it is this investment that will likely justify the issuing of patents.
