Zoo aims to mimic nature with new center
By Mike Lee
September 2, 2012
Forty years into his career, entrepreneur Larry Stambaugh is at an age when most people retire. Instead, he is leveraging decades of experience running companies to launch an unusual venture: mining nature for clues about how people can live sustainably.
It’s part of the San Diego Zoo’s new enterprise — the Centre for Bioinspiration — designed to connect private, public and academic organizations from around the world and apply “nature’s intelligence” to a wide variety of problems.
The concept might sound far-fetched, but a zoo-sponsored study in 2010 said the emerging field of “biomimicry” could become the next major economic driver for science-rich San Diego. Stambaugh envisions the region as a global hub for such work and hopes success here will spur innovation elsewhere.
“We can’t but scratch the surface,” he said.
Biomimicry already has momentum, even though most people don’t think about it: Qualcomm’s Mirasol display screen technology was inspired by the shimmer of butterfly wings. Biologists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego are studying marine worms to understand how they glow in hopes of finding real-world applications.
And decades earlier, Velcro was developed after a Swiss engineer noticed how burrs from plants stuck to his pants and his dog.
“Nature doesn’t make any junk,” said Stambaugh, a turnaround specialist and former head of Maxim Pharmaceuticals, Cryoport and other companies. “Everything that nature makes has a purpose, and we have yet to discover a lot of those purposes.”
Zoo officials would not say how much they are investing in the project.
Stambaugh spent last week in Switzerland attending an international biomimicry conference that San Diego is hosting next year. Before he left — just two weeks into his tenure — he talked about his infant center. Here’s some of that conversation:
Q: What was it that drew you into this venture instead of buying a yacht and sailing off around the world?
A: First, that’s not me. For several years, I have been thinking about this after learning about biomimicry. I said, “You know what, of all the work I have done in my life looking for novel, innovative inventions that can make a difference in life science and environmental science, I think this could be the most profound thing going on on the planet today.”
The more I have watched it over the past years, the more convinced I am that nature, in its 3.8 billion years of evolution, has addressed and adapted to almost any challenge we face now, and our job is to go look and see what we can find and figure out how we can get those solutions.
Biomimicry boom?
The San Diego Zoo Global commissioned an economic analysis of the biomimicry industry by the Fermanian Business & Economic Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University. The 2010 report concluded:
• Biomimicry could represent a revolutionary change in our economy by transforming many of the ways we think about designing, producing, transporting and distributing goods and services.
• In 15 years, biomimicry could represent $300 billion annually of U.S. gross domestic product in 2010 dollars. It could provide an additional $50 billion in terms of mitigating the depletion of various natural resources and reducing CO2 pollution. Biomimicry could account for 1.6 million U.S. jobs by 2025.
• Firms selling biomimicry-inspired products have frequently seen a doubling of sales annually in the early years. Many of these products can offer customers reduced energy requirements, less waste and enhanced performance while being sold at prices competitive with or even less than those of existing products.
• A cluster of 1,000 biologists, naturalists and other scientists could form in San Diego over the next 15 years as a biomimicry core. Including all of the ripple or multiplier effects, this cluster could generate a total of 2,100 jobs and add $325 million to San Diego’s gross regional product annually by 2025.
That is why I joined the zoo. There is a confluence here of the animal and plant collections, and vast knowledge. And we have got such fabulous infrastructure surrounding the zoo, with the life sciences, the clean tech, the wireless, the high tech, all of the universities and institutions here in Southern California. It’s a perfect environment for us to collaborate.
Q: It’s something of a jump, at least on its face, to move from biomedical ventures to this biomimicry field, which includes a wide range of disciplines. How different are they?
A: The similarity is that what we will be doing at the Centre for Bioinspiration is those early stage discoveries — bringing them to a working model, or a proof of concept that can be applied in a meaningful way in the world. The difference would be, in Maxim we took that on through to launching the drug, whereas the center will find a company on the outside that will then take that concept and commercialize it. That is not what we want to try to be good at.
Q: Give me a sense of the range of possibilities here. I assume medicine would be a focal point, but does it go beyond that?
A: Well beyond that. One of the things I noticed in the early groups of people who recognized promise of this area was architects. They got it because architects sometimes look at nature for designs in their buildings, colors, textures. So the whole field of building materials is an area where there are lots of ideas and promise: Natural fibers for carpeting that don’t include synthetics and chemicals, more sustainable green materials for buildings.
It’s going to be anything you can imagine: organizing governments, speeding up computers, building materials. It can be better therapeutics, diagnostics. It’s limitless what nature has done in all this time. Our job is, within our limits, to go find some of these great ideas that are known by zookeepers, botanists and other people in this organization that have an obvious use in the world.
We also expect to be approached by companies who come to the zoo and say, “This is a challenge that we have. Can you look and see if that might be solved in nature somewhere?”
Q: So you will be walking around the zoo and asking botanists if they have a good idea?
A: It’s a little beyond that. More likely than not, it’s going to take some people getting into a room and having a conversation, and thinking about the fact that an owl can fly silently. Someone did think about that and they started looking at the feathers on an owl and they realized there is a design on the feathers that allows silent flight, and that got applied to quiet bullet trains going through tunnels. That is the kind of brainstorming we will do.
Q: Where do you start, given the limitless options?
A: The start is to get the infrastructure built because this is a new logical step for San Diego Zoo Global — to take it from educating and bringing awareness to having this vast knowledge to now commercializing. There are a few ideas already that I have seen — I can’t talk about those publicly yet because of intellectual property and some of those things that we need to protect will have to be kept inside until we have got them far enough along.
Q: Organizationally, what does it look like? Ten people? Two hundred people?
A: We are a startup and we are going to have that entrepreneurial look and feel. We have got a couple people — I will add one additional person and myself — to begin this. We will start working with members of the zoo and the research center and identifying what might be our first projects; we will start building our incubator, which will build funding, as well as teams of management and advisers in various fields.
We will be working with every field imaginable: chemists, botanists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, agronomists, architects. Some of them are part of the zoo. Many of them won’t be.
Q: Where do you go for money?
A: The incubator will be built up with a combination, most likely, of philanthropy and corporate sponsorships. I’ll begin that process soon. The zoo is supporting the early stages of this. And we anticipate becoming self-sustaining fairly quickly — under three years. … We will be applying for grants, both in general for this bioinspiration concept to get it established, as well as for specific projects, just like we do in industry.
In five years I expect the incubator to be developing multiple technologies in San Diego, with some of those in or nearing the market.
Q: You talk about this with such passion that I wonder if you find yourself walking through the Sierra when you have a spare moment. Or is this more academic for you?
A: I am resonant with nature. I grew up in Kansas and walked the woods, and I love the outdoors. But I think it’s natural to all of us. We are all one with nature. Some are closer than others in their awareness, but we are all together in this.
September 2, 2012
Forty years into his career, entrepreneur Larry Stambaugh is at an age when most people retire. Instead, he is leveraging decades of experience running companies to launch an unusual venture: mining nature for clues about how people can live sustainably.
It’s part of the San Diego Zoo’s new enterprise — the Centre for Bioinspiration — designed to connect private, public and academic organizations from around the world and apply “nature’s intelligence” to a wide variety of problems.
The concept might sound far-fetched, but a zoo-sponsored study in 2010 said the emerging field of “biomimicry” could become the next major economic driver for science-rich San Diego. Stambaugh envisions the region as a global hub for such work and hopes success here will spur innovation elsewhere.
“We can’t but scratch the surface,” he said.
Biomimicry already has momentum, even though most people don’t think about it: Qualcomm’s Mirasol display screen technology was inspired by the shimmer of butterfly wings. Biologists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego are studying marine worms to understand how they glow in hopes of finding real-world applications.
And decades earlier, Velcro was developed after a Swiss engineer noticed how burrs from plants stuck to his pants and his dog.
“Nature doesn’t make any junk,” said Stambaugh, a turnaround specialist and former head of Maxim Pharmaceuticals, Cryoport and other companies. “Everything that nature makes has a purpose, and we have yet to discover a lot of those purposes.”
Zoo officials would not say how much they are investing in the project.
Stambaugh spent last week in Switzerland attending an international biomimicry conference that San Diego is hosting next year. Before he left — just two weeks into his tenure — he talked about his infant center. Here’s some of that conversation:
Q: What was it that drew you into this venture instead of buying a yacht and sailing off around the world?
A: First, that’s not me. For several years, I have been thinking about this after learning about biomimicry. I said, “You know what, of all the work I have done in my life looking for novel, innovative inventions that can make a difference in life science and environmental science, I think this could be the most profound thing going on on the planet today.”
The more I have watched it over the past years, the more convinced I am that nature, in its 3.8 billion years of evolution, has addressed and adapted to almost any challenge we face now, and our job is to go look and see what we can find and figure out how we can get those solutions.
Biomimicry boom?
The San Diego Zoo Global commissioned an economic analysis of the biomimicry industry by the Fermanian Business & Economic Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University. The 2010 report concluded:
• Biomimicry could represent a revolutionary change in our economy by transforming many of the ways we think about designing, producing, transporting and distributing goods and services.
• In 15 years, biomimicry could represent $300 billion annually of U.S. gross domestic product in 2010 dollars. It could provide an additional $50 billion in terms of mitigating the depletion of various natural resources and reducing CO2 pollution. Biomimicry could account for 1.6 million U.S. jobs by 2025.
• Firms selling biomimicry-inspired products have frequently seen a doubling of sales annually in the early years. Many of these products can offer customers reduced energy requirements, less waste and enhanced performance while being sold at prices competitive with or even less than those of existing products.
• A cluster of 1,000 biologists, naturalists and other scientists could form in San Diego over the next 15 years as a biomimicry core. Including all of the ripple or multiplier effects, this cluster could generate a total of 2,100 jobs and add $325 million to San Diego’s gross regional product annually by 2025.
That is why I joined the zoo. There is a confluence here of the animal and plant collections, and vast knowledge. And we have got such fabulous infrastructure surrounding the zoo, with the life sciences, the clean tech, the wireless, the high tech, all of the universities and institutions here in Southern California. It’s a perfect environment for us to collaborate.
Q: It’s something of a jump, at least on its face, to move from biomedical ventures to this biomimicry field, which includes a wide range of disciplines. How different are they?
A: The similarity is that what we will be doing at the Centre for Bioinspiration is those early stage discoveries — bringing them to a working model, or a proof of concept that can be applied in a meaningful way in the world. The difference would be, in Maxim we took that on through to launching the drug, whereas the center will find a company on the outside that will then take that concept and commercialize it. That is not what we want to try to be good at.
Q: Give me a sense of the range of possibilities here. I assume medicine would be a focal point, but does it go beyond that?
A: Well beyond that. One of the things I noticed in the early groups of people who recognized promise of this area was architects. They got it because architects sometimes look at nature for designs in their buildings, colors, textures. So the whole field of building materials is an area where there are lots of ideas and promise: Natural fibers for carpeting that don’t include synthetics and chemicals, more sustainable green materials for buildings.
It’s going to be anything you can imagine: organizing governments, speeding up computers, building materials. It can be better therapeutics, diagnostics. It’s limitless what nature has done in all this time. Our job is, within our limits, to go find some of these great ideas that are known by zookeepers, botanists and other people in this organization that have an obvious use in the world.
We also expect to be approached by companies who come to the zoo and say, “This is a challenge that we have. Can you look and see if that might be solved in nature somewhere?”
Q: So you will be walking around the zoo and asking botanists if they have a good idea?
A: It’s a little beyond that. More likely than not, it’s going to take some people getting into a room and having a conversation, and thinking about the fact that an owl can fly silently. Someone did think about that and they started looking at the feathers on an owl and they realized there is a design on the feathers that allows silent flight, and that got applied to quiet bullet trains going through tunnels. That is the kind of brainstorming we will do.
Q: Where do you start, given the limitless options?
A: The start is to get the infrastructure built because this is a new logical step for San Diego Zoo Global — to take it from educating and bringing awareness to having this vast knowledge to now commercializing. There are a few ideas already that I have seen — I can’t talk about those publicly yet because of intellectual property and some of those things that we need to protect will have to be kept inside until we have got them far enough along.
Q: Organizationally, what does it look like? Ten people? Two hundred people?
A: We are a startup and we are going to have that entrepreneurial look and feel. We have got a couple people — I will add one additional person and myself — to begin this. We will start working with members of the zoo and the research center and identifying what might be our first projects; we will start building our incubator, which will build funding, as well as teams of management and advisers in various fields.
We will be working with every field imaginable: chemists, botanists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians, agronomists, architects. Some of them are part of the zoo. Many of them won’t be.
Q: Where do you go for money?
A: The incubator will be built up with a combination, most likely, of philanthropy and corporate sponsorships. I’ll begin that process soon. The zoo is supporting the early stages of this. And we anticipate becoming self-sustaining fairly quickly — under three years. … We will be applying for grants, both in general for this bioinspiration concept to get it established, as well as for specific projects, just like we do in industry.
In five years I expect the incubator to be developing multiple technologies in San Diego, with some of those in or nearing the market.
Q: You talk about this with such passion that I wonder if you find yourself walking through the Sierra when you have a spare moment. Or is this more academic for you?
A: I am resonant with nature. I grew up in Kansas and walked the woods, and I love the outdoors. But I think it’s natural to all of us. We are all one with nature. Some are closer than others in their awareness, but we are all together in this.
Summary:
Larry Stambaugh, an entrepreneur that's been working for forty years into his career, is creating an enterprise called "Centre for Bioinspiration". Biomimicry can change the way our economy is just by changing the ways things are designed. He receives the money from sponsorships and an incubator. He is very passionate about nature because he grew up in the environment. This project i basically just to talk about a new exhibit where they can try to recreate the beauty of nature manually.
This fascinated me because not many people actually have the patience to recreate the beauty of nature because of the complex tree structures and everything in the environment. It's amazing to actually have someone want to recreate the beauty.
This fascinated me because not many people actually have the patience to recreate the beauty of nature because of the complex tree structures and everything in the environment. It's amazing to actually have someone want to recreate the beauty.