Materials Science Opportunities in the Field of Biotechnology with a View to Aircraft Applications

摘要

The following overview of the Headquarters, Naval Air Systems Command's interest in biotechnology with materials science applications offers a kaleidoscope of approaches. The only limitation is that the resulting product have eventual aircraft use. In order to control rigorously the products of fermentation processes, it is necessary to design enzymes, and not merely in a trial-and-error or even procedural fashion, but with a knowledge of enzyme function. At the present time, the function of enzymes in a dynamic sense is not fully understood. As much of biotechnology will be dependent upon enzyme functioning, a clear understanding of the fundamentals of this process is of critical importance to the field. It is not sufficient to develop operational procedures for obtaining enzymes, without providing the underlying physical or mathematical explanation of their function. Such design procedures and analogous to designing airplanes without understanding the principles of flight. A second area needing attention is the working out of practical applications to biopolymer functioning of purely theoretical constructs which already exist in such fields as non-equilibrium statistical physics, theoretical chemistry, mathematical biophysics and biological physics. Of major concern is that biopolymers predominantly function between non-equilibrium states. Therefore, their function needs to be described by laws related to those non-equilibrium states, rather than equilibrium states. An understanding of the dynamic properties of ordered arrays and cooperative functioning is also required.