Interdisciplinarity, biology & micro-nanotechnologies
The convergence between technological and natural objects at the micro- and nanoscale has been long emphasized, including by Stanley Fields 1 whose declaration has become famous:
Because technology provides the tools and biology the problems, the two should enjoy a happy marriage.
Although this statement is awfully simplistic, biology and technology do enjoy a happy marriage, and I was thrilled to experience it during the last three years. My Ph.D work has been very interdisciplinary and I wanted to dedicate a special section of my thesis to how cool, yet difficult, it is to work at the crossroads of biology, chemistry, physics & technology. Because an image is worth a thousand words, I assembled a nice comparison of various reference biological objects and technological devices at the micro- and nanoscale. Most of the images I used were available on Wikimedia Commons and I made the others.
Biological and technological scales compared
The source file is vector graphics, i.e. it can be resized at will without loss of quality or pixelation. It is released under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, which means you are free to use it, modify it, redistribute it for any purpose as long as you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute any derivative works only under the same license.
Links
- Download the vector graphics source file (SVG, 1.46 MB)
- See the author & licensing information page on Wikimedia Commons, including links to all the images used in this one
Notes
- Stanley Fields, The interplay of biology and technology, PNAS, August 28, 2001, 98 (18), 10051-10054; doi: 10.1073/pnas.191380098; full text ↩
