Neri Oxman Quotes

The next time you see a spider web, please, pause and look a little closer. You'll be seeing one of the most high-performance materials known to man.

So someday in the near future hopefully rather than having a foot or a leg amputated we'll just give you an injection of the cells and restore the blood flow. We've also created entire tubes of red blood cells from scratch in the laboratory. So there are a lot of exciting things in the pipeline.

For me, each day begins and ends with wanting to learn a little more about the secrets of spider silk.

Biologically inspired materials could revolutionize materials science. People looking at spider silk and abalone shells are looking for new ways to make materials better, cheaper, and with less toxic byproducts.

We're now able to 3D print in 200 different materials, from titanium to rubber, plastic, glass, ceramic, leathers, and even chocolate.

You don't work with spiders very long before you start noticing how important silk is to their life and just how special that is for spiders.

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.

We've managed to motion-track the silkworm's movement as it is building its cocoon. Our aim was to translate the motion-capture data into a 3D printer connected to a robotic arm in order to study the biological structure in larger scales.

In the end, it's clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature to designs made with and by nature to, possibly, designing nature herself.

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.

The medical nanobots in my novel 'Small Miracles' tap the energy sources that the patient's own body provides. That is, they can metabolize glycerol and glucose, just as the cells in our bodies do.

The only way to make something cheaply today is to have it mass-produced. For example, you wear the same shoes as everyone else. If you had a fabber, you could custom-make shoes that perfectly fit your feet. Three-dimensional printing will help us move away from the mass consumption that is so deeply ingrained in our culture.

We're on the brink of the next industrial revolution. Instead of buying things, you can make them on a printer. When you have a 3D printer, you can iterate more - what used to take months, now takes hours.

It's like the spiders are sharing an ancient secret with me, and that's why I'm going to spend the rest of my life studying spider silk.

The Strandbeest is a self-replicating meme, a brain virus. It infects the student's brain. In fact, the Strandbeest abuse students for their reproduction. For two years, this reproduction fell into a flow acceleration. Now, 3D printers produce walking mini Strandbeests.

I'm very interested in 3D.

The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would be something more like a minute.

On April 8, 1982, I was alone in the electron microscope room when I discovered the Icosahedral Phase that opened the field of quasi-periodic crystals.

When we looked out at the world and saw what 3D scanners could do, we wanted to make something that could make really high quality models that you could create on your MakerBot.

The science of semiconducting and metallic polymers is inherently interdisciplinary; it falls at the intersection of chemistry and physics.

Once we understand how molecules are formed, we can manipulate them. If you can manipulate molecules, you can manipulate genes and matter, you can synthesize new material - the implications are just unbelievable.

But I do believe that there's going to be a time where all movies are going to be made in 3D and it's just going to be a given, and that is going to be an exciting time.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

What is important about graphene is the new physics it has delivered.

Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.