To Learn About Nature Look to Nature Itself

On a dinner cruise through Matsushima, in early summer 1999, I filled my plate at the buffet and sat down at an empty table. I soon was joined by six colleagues. Looking around the table, I realized that I was surrounded by six of the most important leaders in the field of hearing research. Then I realized that the majority of them were electrical engineers by training and commented on that fact. It turned out that five were trained as electrical engineers. The sixth, trained as a physiologist, spent his career to date collaborating with an electrical engineer at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. And he is an excellent engineer in his own right. By their biomedical colleagues, all six are considered to be biologists of the first rank. But each of them, at core, remains an engineer. What each of them does is reverse engineeringVreverse engineering of systems, devices, communication strategies, and signal processing strategies designed by nature rather than by other engineers. I . REVERSE ENGINEERING