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/ Events

Bioinspiration of new technologies

27 May 2015 08:30 - 18:00

Scientific discussion meeting organised by Professor Denis Noble CBE FRS, Professor Clemens Kaminski and Professor Richard Templer

Event details

Biological structures and processes have benefited from billions of years of refinement during the process of the evolution of life on earth. So why should we not benefit from what nature discovered in designing our own new technologies? This meeting brings together scientists from a range of disciplines to discuss how nature has inspired their work and how this can contribute to the technological evolution.

The meeting programme is available to download. To access the journal articles relating to the event, visit the Interface Focus website.

Online participation

In addition to attracting an audience in London, this meeting was webcast live and featured an online question and comment system, allowing participation and discussion across the world.

The discussion was also carried through to Twitter, and a Storify of Tweets is available to access here

In 2015 the Royal Society marked the 350th anniversary of Philosophical Transactions, the world’s first science journal. Philosophical Transactions introduced the fundamental concepts and processes of scholarly communication which are still used by almost 30,000 journals published today.

Royal Society journals have long been the vehicle by which papers given at our prestigious discussion meetings are disseminated to a broad audience beyond the meeting. For our anniversary year, we held this meeting to reach out to new audiences over the web and around the world, allowing online attendees to ask questions, comment and join the discussion.

Enquiries about the meeting or online participation: Contact the events team

Organisers

  • Professor Denis Noble CBE FMedSci FRS, University of Oxford, UK

    Denis Noble discovered slowly activated potassium channel currents in the heart and undertook a quantitative analysis of their role in controlling repolarisation and pacemaker activity. He also discovered the ionic mechanisms by which adrenaline increases heart rate.

    He has shown that therapeutic levels of cardiac glycosides may increase, rather than decrease, potassium gradients in the heart, and has published an analytical treatment of membrane excitation theory and cable theory that provides a modern basis for the concepts of safety factor, liminal length, excitation time constants and the phenomenon of repetitive firing. He published two books on this early work: The Initiation of the Heartbeat (1975) and Electric Current Flow in Excitable Cells (1975).

    He is the author of the first popular book on systems biology, The Music of Life (2006) and his most recent papers and lectures concern the implications for evolutionary biology.

  • Professor Clemens Kaminski, University of Cambridge, UK

    Clemens Kaminski is Professor of Chemical Physics at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Sensor Technologies and Applications.  He pioneered ultra-high speed imaging techniques for the study of chemistry both for gas phase reactions and, more recently, in biological systems.  He is recipient of the Cyril Hinshelwoold Prize 2004, Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2005, SAOT Research prize in optics, 2008, and the Morris Sugden award in 2013. Kaminski is co-founder of the Cambridge Advanced Imaging Center (CAIC) and director of CamBridgeSens, the strategic network to unite sensor research across the University of Cambridge.  He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.

  • Professor Richard Templer, Imperial College London, UK