FEATURE

Biomimicry

The science of learning from nature.

Prof. B. M. Hegde,

hegdebm@gmail.com

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world"  

John Muir                  

I keep reminding the readers about our wrong efforts at learning science by teaching nature a lesson or two. We could have a better science by understanding nature’s working better has been my hypothesis. I was introduced to some work being done at the Karolinska Institute in this direction by an old student of mine, Dr. Sunder. He wrote to tell me that my pet theory of learning from nature has now been taken up in the west and they also think it might yield better results. We shall discuss just one area for this write up.

Chronic kidney failure (CKF) has been a very lucrative medical business for the corporate lobby next only to cardiac interventions and keeping dying patients in the ICU for the last ten days.In the US there are many “dialysis only” facilities. They are like the hair cutting shops. Patients walk in and remain there for a few hours and get dialysed and go home to come back again at periodic intervals. They might have about a dozen beds at a given time used for dialysis. Reports say that this is such a good business that these doctors do not advice their patients kidney transplant at the right time when it could be more beneficial to the patients. Instead they wait till the last minute when transplant could be more dangerous and less useful. All this is because they want their clients for longer time to make more money. This is the audit report. Kidney transplant is another big business which all of us know in great detail.

But look at nature. American native bear (ursidae) is a good example here. These bears hibernate for months without any food or water. They do not make any urine and have no exercise at all, they remain immobile for months. They sleep all the time. But when they wake up they are as fit as they were and might even attack their enemy with the same ferocity as they could do while they were ambulant. It is interesting to note that when they wake up they have very low urea nitrogen levels, healthy lean body mass, very strong bones, and no evidence of any thrombotic complications! If only our scientists could find out how and why these bears do not develop uraemia, muscle wasting, bone density loss (osteoporosis) and atherosclerosis and thrombotic complications we will have found out novel and easy methods of treating chronic kidney failure patients without dialysis and transplant as of now! 

Million dollar question here is who will fund this “rice bowl breaking” research effort? If successful this will demolish the very lucrative dialysis and kidney transplant businesses. Please understand that neither dialysis nor kidney transplant is a cure for chronic kidney failure. They are only quick-fix solutions of modern medical science, like many others like them. But the industry likes these quick fixes in place of permanent cures!

Contrast this with our science where we create disease models in animals, mostly rats, dogs and pigs. We try and study them to gain our present wisdom. What we do not realise is that they are in no way closer to human physiology and when we create human diseases in them they react , sometimes in a diametrically opposite direction. One example would do to explain. We produce heart failure in rats and then use our new chemical molecules on them to see if they work and if they do we use them in humans. Some years ago there was a wonder drug called, Milrinone, a cousin of amrinone. This showed wonderful results in rats in the treatment of heart failure, one of the biggest problems of old age. The company was so impressed that they convinced (lobbied) the FDA to pass it even without human studies. Indian “great” cardiologists used to get the drug from USA for their rich patients quite a lot of whom met their makers prematurely but the death was blamed on the bad heart failure. Soon enough the first human study PROMISE (Prospective randomised milrinone evaluation study) was started. Within six months into the study the preliminary report showed 37% extra unexplained deaths in the milrinone wing of the trial compared the placebo and the study was stopped and the drug withdrawn from the market. Lots of people had died by then. Later physiologic studies showed that the drug, in fact, helps a rat’s heart while it is dangerous for the failing human heart! We do not go into the details here.

Respect nature as your mother and learn from her; if you abuse nature she will kick you in the teeth! Scientists! Are you listening? Long live mankind learning from nature as our Indian scientists of yore did.

  “In all things in nature there is something of the marvellous”         Aristotle.

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