Neri Oxman Quotes

Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications.

Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?

I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

There's so many ways of making product design easier, more efficient, quicker. People are now taking DNA from cows and growing leather. The implications of that, in what it has from a grain standpoint, are enormous.

The potential for synthetic biology and biotechnology is vast; we all have an opportunity to create the future together.

We're seeing a move toward making things that either chemistry cannot make or can't make efficiently but biology does.

In nature, there is no separation between design, engineering, and fabrication; the bone does it all.

When you think of all the things that are made from oil or in the chemical industry, if in the future we could find cells to replace most of those processes, the ideal way would be to do it by direct design.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

Better biofuels are a really big deal. That means we can precisely engineer the molecules in the fuel chain and optimize them along the way. So, if all goes well, they're going to have designer bugs in warm vats that are eating and digesting sugars to excrete better biofuels. I guess that's better living through bugs.

For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now.

Cities might become biological entities, walls hung with curtains of algae that glow at night and sequester carbon, and floors made from tweaked cellular material that strengthens like bones as we walk on it.

Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill.

As the Industrial Age is drawing to a close, I think that we're witnessing the dawn of the era of biological design.

In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.

In the past, biology has been a backwater type of activity - a bunch of nerds in a lab. Now the sheer potential of biology to re-program our physical world is a new reality for everyone.

The future of design is a future where anything material in the environment - whether it's wearables, cars, buildings - can be designed with this variation of properties and relationship with the environment that can take part in the natural ecology.

Nature is a brilliant engineer and builder. It knows how to create seashells that are twice as strong as the most resistant ceramics human beings can manufacture, and it produces silk fibers five times stronger than steel. Nature also knows how to create multipurpose forms.

Engineering the biological world was even more interesting than engineering the mechanical world.

I decided that I wanted to become an engineer of the biological world, specifically a protein engineer.

I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics.

We're beginning to enter an era where it gets really cheap and really fast to begin to do things like make fuels, and make textiles, and make extra teeth for ourselves. And we're beginning to think about how we regrow our bladders.

Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.

Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.