Engineering Renaissance

The manufacture of pyrotechnics from the Renaissance onward has been conducted, and still is practiced in certain places, as a household art or familiar craft. The artificer1 needs patience and skill and ingenuity for his work. For large-scale factory production, the pyrotechnist has few problems in chemical engineering but many in the control of craftsmanship. His work, like that of the wood-carver or bookbinder, requires manual dexterity but transcends artistry and becomes art by the free play of the imagination for the production of beauty. He knows the kinds of effects, audible and visible, which he can get from his materials. He knows this as the graphic artist knows the appearance of his... 

In Renaissance Italy, Leonardo da Vinci used what he called a braccio, or arm, in laying out his works. It was equal to two palmi, or palms. But arms and palms, of course, will differ. In Horence, the engineers used a braccio that was 23 inches long, while the surveyors braccio averaged only 21.7 inches. The foot, or piede, was about 17 inches in MHan, but only about 12 inches in Rome. 

Whole-cell based biocatalysis utilizes an entire microorganism for the production of the desired product. One of the oldest examples for industrial applications of whole-cell biocatalysis is the production of acetic acid from ethanol with an immobilized Acetobacter strain, which was developed nearly 200 yr ago. The key advantage of whole-cell biocatalysis is the ability to use cheap and abundant raw materials and catalyze multistep reactions. Recent advances in metabolic engineering have brought a renaissance to whole-cell biocatalysis. In the following sections, two novel industrial processes that utilize whole-cell biocatalysis are discussed with emphasis on the important role played by metabolic engineering. 

During the past decade the study of electrochemical phenomena has advanced in several disciplines, including physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, and the life sciences, among others. Very recently, a renaissance has occurred in this field because of new-found abilities to create precisely characterized systems for fundamental study, to monitor behavior at previously unattainable levels of sensitivity, and to predict (i.e., design) with new theories and computational skill. These capabilities are creating extraordinary opportunities, both for advancement of science and for the transfer of that science into new products and processes. 

Paolo Galluzzi, The Art of Invention Leonardo and Renaissance Engineers (Florence Giunti,... 

Engineered mouse strains that produce human antibodies represent a major technological breakthrough that has contributed significantly to the renaissance in mAb therapeutics. The development of mice capable of producing human antibodies requires two major steps. First, the mouse Ig loci must be inactivated resulting in mice incapable of producing mouse Ig antibodies, and second, the human Ig loci must be stably introduced. 

If we define biomedical engineering as the systematic application of existing science and technology to medical problems, our field has its real beginning in the renaissance period. Its early development was inspired by and dependent upon the simultaneous development of physics it was based on the belief that living organisms obeyed the same laws as inanimate objects and could be described in terms of these laws. 

The emergence of the Renaissance can also be explained strictly from an inventive engineering perspective. The sociocultural paradigm that was the Renaissance can be considered as a system. As such, its evolution can be described by patterns of evolution (Clarke 2000, Zlotin and Zusman 2006), which provides an excellent explanation for the nature of expected change. Three types of relevant evolutionary patterns are provided here. 

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