“This,” Joanna Aizenberg says slyly, picking up a latticed tube from
her desk in Pierce Hall, “is a glass house you can throw stones at.”
The tube, tapered to a close at one end and festooned with a cluster of
curious white fibers at the tip, resembles an upturned dog’s tail. It
is, in fact, the skeleton of a deep-sea sponge, she reveals, made
entirely out of a natural glass. The tube acts as a kind of high-rise
apartment building for shrimp that live symbiotically in the sponge’s
tissue.
The glass, drawn thinly into lacy threads, looks astonishingly fragile
for a structure that withstands thousands of pounds of pressure per
square inch at depths exceeding 500 meters below the ocean surface.
Aizenberg agrees. “It’s incredibly strong — but why? What mechanical principles make this particular design work so well?”
As the Gordon McKay Professor of Materials Science in Harvard’s School
of Engineering and Applied Sciences, one of Aizenberg’s current
projects is to use synthetic materials to model and modify the
sea-sponge structure. Tinkering with the glass lattice design allows
her to see exactly what each geometric element — whether it is the
tube’s foundational mesh of squares with diagonals, or its helical
external ridges — contributes to the strength and flexibility of the
whole.
“Nature builds structures, and it builds them better than we do. There
are new design principles to be taken from nature. My job,” says
Aizenberg, who joined Harvard last year as the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute after a nine-year stint as a
researcher at Bell Laboratories, “is to find out what they are and how
to use them.”
Finding natural structures to study is the first order of business, and
much of the initial stage of Aizenberg’s research sounds like a good
ocean-side summer holiday in disguise: rummaging in bins and dark
corners of curiosity shops, beachcombing, and even snorkeling.
As a Ph.D. student in Israel, Aizenberg went on regular diving
expeditions in the Red Sea, collecting whatever she could from the sea
floor. When she’s at the beach, she keeps an eye out for shells with
unusual changes in their design.
Her analytical instinct in this regard is as restless as her search.
“I try to think of what’s responsible for the change,” she says,
“whether it’s a protein or the local salinity, or even a mechanical
principle that might result in some interesting aberration.”
Sometimes the search for specimens can be as revealing as the
analysis itself. When Aizenberg found the sea sponge in a curiosity
shop, it had been lying in a dark corner on the lowest shelf.
“It was unusually bright — surprisingly bright, which gave me the
idea that these hairs on the end are optical fibers that light up the
whole structure,” she says. “We think we just now invented fiber optics
for telecommunications, but this sponge has benefited from it for
millennia.”
The sponge, she speculates, uses the fibers for its own
communication purposes: The fibers direct light from bioluminescent
bacteria into the glass structure. Small deep-sea organisms flock to
the glowing glass — a useful perk in a low-food-density zone for
preying shrimp.
Aizenberg’s hypothesis about the function of the fibers — a deep-sea
version of room service for shrimp — makes the structure sound less
like a high-rise than a high-class hotel. An offhand remark underscores
this impression of elegance and polish: “This sponge is considered to
be a work of art by glass designers. Almost anything that nature makes
has the artistic touch. People didn’t even realize that it’s a
biological form.”
Aizenberg takes the philosophical underpinnings of her research to
heart. Her projects knock down disciplinary walls, cross-cutting old
categorical divisions between nature and artifice. Her research fairly
shouts that what is natural is built, and what is built is built best
from nature’s blueprints.
The architectural metaphors are not lost on her. Her work aligns itself
closely with the design-oriented disciplines that cluster around
material science and mechanical engineering. In the course of her
career she has, in fact, cultivated a fierce allegiance to the arts.
She guest-lectures for classes at New York School of Design and has
given talks at the Science and Art Cabaret in Greenwich Village. At the
moment she is hatching a plan for an undergraduate course on nature and
design. She holds a joint appointment with the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study, a position that brings her into contact with each
year’s fresh crop of Radcliffe Fellows, selected from an enormous range
of fields in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
She admits that, after working for years in industry at Bell
Laboratories, the Radcliffe appointment was one of her reasons for
choosing to teach at Harvard.
“The community is unbelievable,” she says. “It’s unmatched. Nowhere in
the world do you have the kind of collaboration you find here — the
bringing together of engineering, chemistry, medicine, developing
fields — science and art. People think that science and art don’t have
anything to do with each other.”
Aizenberg jumps from her desk and hurries over to a bulletin board
adorned with Science magazine covers showing magnified crystal
formations.
“But take biologically formed crystals. I did my undergraduate and
graduate degree in crystallography and found myself often spending time
in the microscope room simply admiring their incredible formations.
They’re art. I sometimes forget that I’m doing science because it’s
just so beautiful.”
Before returning to her desk, she makes a detour toward a collection of
brightly colored plastic toys amassed on her windowsill. Like a
grade-schooler at show-and-tell, she proffers a set of Rubik’s Cubes in
dimensions of 2 inches, 3 inches, 4 inches, and Homer Simpson.
Homer’s bust, cut into eight swiveling quadrants (a contoured version
of the 2-inch cube), is actually quite a hard puzzle, Aizenberg says.
“You’re looking at only the facial features to solve it, and it’s
confusing.”
Aizenberg, it turns out, collects puzzles and toys in addition to her
natural curiosities. Her wonder and gleeful delight at both are the
same: When she tosses up a segmented shell of interlinking blue plastic
joints, the toy expands midair and flips inside out before landing back
in her palm in a flaming shade of pink.
“Did you see it change color?” she asks excitedly. “Did you see it change color?”
