Human Body Inspires Engineering Design

The chemical processing industry is aware of the complexity of the refineries and chemical processing plants that produce the multitude of chemicals that make our life easier. A chemical processing plant can have thousands of motors, hundreds of tanks, miles of piping, and tens of thousands of transmitters sending measurements back to a control room to allow operators to properly control a process for making just a few products. The computers that control these processes take thousands of hours to program. Imagine a chemical plant that is self maintaining, self repairing, self regulating, responds to a huge variety of conditions, uses a large variety of feedstock, and lasts for over 75 years! That chemical plant would be our bodies, of course.


http://www.controlglobal.com/articles/2006/248.