Animate Materials

I know how to position my next grant proposal: my area of study will be animate materials. This idea comes from reading a witty blog post by Philip Ball about the limits of our imagination when thinking about future cities, their tech and society. Many exciting things fall into the category of animate materials; you’ve likely heard of smart materials or self-healing materials. Animate might be a synonym for Life. Organisms can be smart, self-healing, and engage in a variety of other activities. All hail the self-repairing car – it just needs to be omnivorous!

I scrawled the phrase “Animate Materials” in my research-reading notes to help me remember it. Then I thought I should write a blog post because physically scrawling something on a piece of paper has less permanence than encoding it in 0’s and 1’s on a cloud server – it’s shocking how we think in the twenty-first century – the virtual having more permanence than the physical! All it will take is a major worldwide crash to see how robust our system really is.

These past several weeks I’ve been reading and thinking about the rise and role of autocatalysis in metabolic evolution, or “how does a chemical system become animate?” I even ran some preliminary calculations to test the feasibility of a new project based on a figure in a book I’m reading. So while I’m interested in the origin-of-life, a question for which it’s not so easy to get grant funding, maybe I can spin my interests into studying the fundamentals of animated materials – using biochemistry as a guide to design potentially interesting new materials from small organic molecules. I just need to work on how to make the connection compelling between the systems I really want to delve into, and the systems of interest to materials science, perhaps.

In his article, Ball thinks that in the future, materials will be protean. The reader of Harry Potter will immediately recognize the protean charm, a piece of clever magic Hermione comes up with for coded communication. (All that magic around Hogwarts disrupts the use of electronics so your cellphones won’t work.) Animate materials are by definition protean – they can change their form. The word comes from Proteus, a water-god, also known as Old Man of the Sea. The Greek protos, from which we get proton, means “first”. Its counterpart protogonos means “primordial”, which to my ears has origin-of-life connotations. It’s also where we get “protein”, fittingly so since origin-of-life research kicked off with Miller’s experiment where amino acids were synthesized from simpler substances. It seems the connection of life’s origins and animate materials are not so far as they might have first appeared!