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The Patents Nature Never Filed

  • Writer: Sreyamsa Bairiganjan
    Sreyamsa Bairiganjan
  • Aug 27
  • 13 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

Issue 04 · Design · 17.8315° S, 31.0526° E


The shape of growth is a termitarium.


A minimalist locator map marking Eastgate Centre in Harare at 17.8315 degrees south and 31.0526 degrees east

17.8315° S, 31.0526° E. The pin falls on Harare.


The largest archive of working designs on earth has never charged a licence fee.


Harare’s Eastgate Centre leads to a termite mound, Japan’s Shinkansen, a machine that reads proteins and a bargain struck in a Costa Rican forest. Together, they trace the distance between noticing something useful in nature and turning it into economic value, then ask who remains in the bargain once that value becomes property.


The building that stored the night


Eastgate fills a city block in central Harare, where two nine-storey buildings face one another across an internal street beneath a glass roof. Steel bridges cross the space between them, and brick chimneys give the roofline the look of a small industrial town. When the Zimbabwean developer Old Mutual Properties began planning Eastgate in 1991, the brief asked for comfortable offices without conventional air conditioning. Environmental ambition belonged in that decision, although so did money. Arup, which designed the building’s structural, mechanical and electrical systems, estimated that imported cooling plant could account for 15 to 25 per cent of the cost of a modern office building. The owner would then remain dependent on imported parts and specialised maintenance.


Harare’s warm afternoons often fall away into cool nights, producing a daily temperature swing of 10 to 14 degrees Celsius. Eastgate was turned and shaded to limit the sun. Its windows were kept modest, while exposed concrete absorbed heat without immediately passing it into the rooms. After dark, locally made fans draw cooler air through voids beneath the floors and clear the day’s heat from the structure. Smaller fans bring in fresh air during working hours. Warmer exhaust rises through shafts and leaves at roof level.


Later accounts sometimes turned this into a building that breathed by itself. That version quietly misplaced the fans, filters, controls and engineering calculations. Eastgate has no central refrigeration plant, but it is neither a cave nor a purely passive creature. Its achievement lies in asking relatively simple machinery, carefully directed air and a large quantity of concrete to work with the climate instead of spending electricity to cancel it. Much of the equipment could be made and maintained in Zimbabwe. The design therefore altered the energy bill as well as the direction in which the capital travelled.


The energy claims grew more dramatic as the building became famous. It is now easy to find the assertion that Eastgate uses only a tenth as much energy as a conventional building. Arup’s account from 1997 was more cautious and more revealing. Early readings placed office consumption between 48 and 83 per cent of six comparable air-conditioned buildings in Harare, and the engineers declined a final verdict before they had a full year of comparable data. The ventilation installation cost roughly a tenth as much as fully mechanical air conditioning. Additional structure was needed for thermal mass, however, so the total building cost was not dramatically lower. Eastgate moved more of the expense into local materials, uncomplicated equipment and a building that Harare could look after.


Mick Pearce, Eastgate’s architect, has long spoken of the termite mound as a biological precedent. The whole nest is a termitarium, a less familiar word that names not merely the mound’s silhouette but the inhabited architecture of chambers, passages, soil and moving air. The version then familiar to many architects owed much to the Swiss entomologist Martin Lüscher, who imagined heat from the colony and its fungus gardens lifting stale air through a central chimney while cooler air descended through passages nearer the surface. It was an irresistible picture of a circulation system raised from grains of soil by insects that had never seen a drawing. Once placed beside Eastgate, tunnels became ducts, packed earth became concrete and the mound’s upper passages became chimneys.


The colour interior of Eastgate Centre in Harare beside a cut-open Odontotermes mound showing its chambers and passages
Inside Eastgate Centre, Harare, in 2003, beside a section through the structure above ground of an Odontotermes mound. Eastgate photograph by Gary Bembridge, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Photograph of the mound section by Shyamal, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Both images cropped and arranged as a diptych; original colour retained.

Yet the documents make that ancestry less tidy. Arup’s contemporary report says nothing about termites and concentrates on computer models, a mock office built at full scale, measured rates of air exchange and principles of passive cooling already used in several British buildings. The biology of the mound was also being revised. The physiologist Scott Turner measured temperatures and gas movement across scores of southern African mounds and found that the old diagram that likened the mound to an air conditioner made the colony far too orderly. Nest temperatures largely followed the surrounding soil, while wind and daily changes in temperature moved air through a porous network. Species, weather and mound form changed the pattern, making the mound sometimes an external lung and sometimes something more changeable still.


Eastgate is more interesting once that family tree is left untidy. Pearce did not find finished drawings in the savanna, because a living structure merely made another way of thinking possible; Harare’s climate, the price of imported machinery and the ordinary physics of heat decided what could survive. Nature supplied a useful question, while the building acquired parents in biology, older practice in passive cooling and Zimbabwean necessity.


Almost a century and a half earlier, Joseph Paxton had staged a more theatrical encounter with a living structure at Chatsworth. In November 1849, his daughter Annie, aged seven, dressed as a fairy, stood upon one enormous leaf of Victoria regia, and the leaf held her above the water. A familiar version of design history lets its radiating ribs reappear two years later in the roof of the Crystal Palace, although the engineering record refuses to leave the story so neat. The pattern of ridges and furrows roof had been shown to Paxton by John Claudius Loudon in the late 1820s, and Paxton had spent years testing it in glasshouses. The lily may have sharpened the analogy without drawing the palace, and, as at Eastgate, what looks later like a flash of imitation was an apprenticeship in structure, climate and light.


An 1849 Illustrated London News engraving of Annie Paxton standing on a giant Victoria regia lily leaf at Chatsworth while spectators gather around the tank
Annie Paxton standing on a leaf of Victoria regia at Chatsworth as spectators gather around the lily tank, 17 November 1849. Engraving from The Illustrated London News, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. No changes made.

The bird at the tunnel mouth


On the San’yō Shinkansen, speed created a problem Eastgate never had to face because the air had almost nowhere to go. A fast train entering a narrow tunnel pushes a compression wave ahead of it. The wave travels at the speed of sound and can leave the far portal as a pulse strong enough to shake doors and windows. Trial runs in 1975 brought complaints from people living along the line, and the difficulty grew as the railway prepared for still higher speeds. JR West, the railway company serving western Japan, began developing the 500 Series to run at 300 kilometres an hour. Its engineers worked on entrance hoods, shafts, barriers, pantographs and the body of the train because no single alteration could quiet the entire system.


Among the engineers responsible for the test runs was Eiji Nakatsu, who spent enough of his time away from the railway watching birds to recognise a familiar movement in an unfamiliar problem. A kingfisher passes from air into water, a medium far more resistant than the one it has left, without throwing up the splash that its speed would seem to promise. Nakatsu wondered whether the bird’s long beak might have something to say about a train passing just as abruptly from open air into the confined air of a tunnel. The resemblance did not amount to evidence, but it was a place to begin.


The team fired differently shaped models into a pipe and ran computer simulations of tunnel entry. The profile that performed well gradually approached the long and smoothly widening form of the kingfisher’s beak, until the finished nose of the 500 Series extended to 15 metres and became almost circular in cross section. The bird was not copied whole. Its beak suggested a direction that still had to survive calculation and experiment.


A common kingfisher beside the nose of a 500 Series Shinkansen
A common kingfisher beside the 500 Series Shinkansen. Composite by Laitche and Cassiopeia sweet, via Wikimedia Commons. Released into the public domain by the uploader. No changes made.

The 500 Series entered service in 1997, and Nakatsu later wrote that the completed design reduced the pressure generated on entering a tunnel by 30 per cent and consumed 15 per cent less electricity while travelling 10 per cent faster than the previous series. His figures describe the finished train and should not be mistaken for proof that a beak delivered every improvement. Japan’s own railway engineering history records the wider system of countermeasures, including entrance hoods and the optimisation of the nose. The kingfisher mattered because it sent the search in a fruitful direction, after which the railway still had to test, calculate and build its way to the result.


Harare and Osaka were answering different constraints, with Old Mutual trying to reduce its dependence on expensive imported machinery while JR West wanted more speed without imposing more noise and energy demand on the communities and infrastructure around the line. In both places, the established catalogue had become costly, so the designers widened the field in which an answer might be found. Biological knowledge entered the economy at that moment, not as decoration or as a promise that every organism conceals a product, but as another way to search when engineering had begun to run out of obvious moves.

When the library becomes searchable


One summer morning in 1941, the Swiss engineer George de Mestral returned from a hunting trip in the Jura with burdock burrs fixed to his trousers and his dog’s fur. Under a microscope, each nuisance resolved into hundreds of small hooks. It took nearly eight years, a French weaver, a change from cotton to nylon and new machinery to make the trick repeatable on a loom. In 1955, the United States granted patent 2,717,437 for a “velvet type fabric and method of producing same.” The plant supplied the provocation, while de Mestral’s claim lay in the difficult work of making its trick repeatable.


A golden retriever with burdock burrs caught in its chest fur beside close-up views of a burdock burr and hook-and-loop fastener
Greater burdock burrs caught in a dog’s coat, the hooked bracts that make them cling, and the hook-and-loop mechanism they inspired. Explanatory composite created for The Shape of Growth; dog photograph by Jiyoon Leee via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0).

Nature’s archive was nevertheless immense and almost impossible to index. Pearce happened to know the termite story, Nakatsu carried years of birdwatching into a railway problem, and de Mestral’s burr became useful because it snagged the right pair of trousers. Biological knowledge travelled in particular memories, so chance determined which possibilities design was able to notice.


Janine Benyus’s 1997 book Biomimicry did not invent the word, although it gave the modern field much of its language. A decade later, the Biomimicry Institute (a nonprofit that develops tools and programmes for design inspired by nature) began building AskNature, arranging biology around what organisms manage to do rather than only around scientific classification. A designer can search for ways in which life filters water, resists impact, reduces drag or builds without much waste. By 2023, more than 2,000 pages about biological strategies had been published, enough to make the catalogue useful and nowhere near enough to represent the living world.


The Institute’s first experiment assisted by AI reduced preparation time by 80 per cent across 20 pages, while human editors still reviewed the science and decided whether each analogy deserved to be made. It has also tested an interface that lets a designer describe a problem in ordinary language and receive possible biological strategies. Search now reaches beyond whatever one designer happens to remember.


AlphaFold belongs here for a narrower reason. It does not search for products in nature, but it has made the predicted structures of more than 200 million proteins freely available. Shape is central to what proteins do, and a map that once required years of experimental work can now be explored at extraordinary speed, although a prediction remains a hypothesis until experiments show that it behaves as expected.


Faster search can also multiply weak analogies. Evolution does not optimise organisms for human use, and structures shaped by ancestry or compromise may solve a different problem from the one a designer imagines. The translation from biology to engineering therefore still needs experiments, materials knowledge and judgement, while AI remains useful precisely because it can search more widely without being mistaken for proof.


Cheaper search has an economic consequence because knowledge can be used by one person without being used up for another. JR West’s study of the kingfisher did not prevent another railway from returning to the same beak, and an understood biological strategy can move across firms, industries and borders at little cost. Finding it, understanding it and making it work outside the organism remain expensive. As search becomes easier, collections, field knowledge, laboratories and the engineering capacity to translate a discovery become more valuable together.


Economists use the language of industrial option value for possibilities worth preserving before their eventual use is known, and biodiversity contains such possibilities at extraordinary scale. An unnamed insect may carry a useful way of adhering to a wet surface, an unsequenced fungus may contain an enzyme that changes a manufacturing process, and a plant known to a local community for generations may hold chemistry that formal science has not yet understood. No one can know in advance which possibility a future constraint will make valuable, which is precisely why keeping the range of possibilities alive has value in the present. Extinction closes one of those possibilities permanently at the same moment that our tools for reading the archive are improving.

The forest as industrial capital


Costa Rica tried to build an institution around that value long before the search tools were ready. In 1991, the country’s National Biodiversity Institute, known as INBio, entered an agreement with the pharmaceutical company Merck that drew attention far beyond either organisation. INBio would collect and prepare samples from Costa Rican plants, insects and microorganisms for screening. Merck supplied an initial one million dollars, equipment and training, and promised royalties if the work produced a commercial product. Some of the money supported conservation, while some helped build scientific capacity inside Costa Rica. The country was trying to remain present after the sample left the forest, participating in the knowledge made from its biological wealth rather than serving only as its source.


Costa Rican parataxonomist Ruth Franco showing a tray of barcoded specimens in front of specimen boxes
Ruth Franco, a BioLep parataxonomist, shows barcoded voucher specimens at Estación Biológica Santa Rosa, Costa Rica, in 2009. Photograph by Roger Blanco, from Janzen and Hallwachs (2011), PLOS ONE, Creative Commons Attribution licence.

The agreement was welcomed as a model of bioprospecting and criticised as a bargain struck between parties with very different power. It also failed to produce the pharmaceutical windfall that early accounts led many people to expect. A later review found that the Merck–INBio programme had not yielded a major drug that produced major revenue, which made the quieter returns easier to see. People had been trained, collections and laboratories strengthened, taxonomic knowledge accumulated and Costa Rican institutions had learned more about negotiating the next agreement. A forest cannot finance its conservation by behaving like a cupboard full of lottery tickets. Its more dependable value grows through the patient capacity to know what is there and to remain part of whatever knowledge comes afterward.


Costa Rica’s experience shows that the presence of many species does not by itself create an economic advantage, any more than mineral deposits alone make a country industrial. The advantage also depends on taxonomists who can recognise what is present, collections and databases that keep biological knowledge usable, agreements that protect the rights of communities, and firms able to carry an observation through materials science, testing and production. Without those capabilities, samples travel, patents are filed elsewhere and most of the value follows them.


International law has been moving, slowly and imperfectly, toward the same recognition. The Nagoya Protocol places access to genetic resources within a framework of prior consent and fair benefit sharing, including where traditional knowledge is involved. In 2024, members of the World Intellectual Property Organization adopted a treaty requiring patent applicants to disclose the origin of genetic resources when a claimed invention is based upon them. Under it, applicants would also have to identify the Indigenous people or local community that supplied associated traditional knowledge. The treaty has not yet entered into force. At the time of writing, four countries had ratified or acceded, while 15 are required. Even unfinished, it acknowledges something the language of a free natural archive can conceal. The legal question is whether the people who conserved, classified and understood living systems remain in the chain once an invention is claimed.


An aerodynamic principle may be studied repeatedly without being depleted, while a forest, a genetic resource and the knowledge of a community cannot be treated as ownerless abstractions. The archive becomes more useful when our ability to observe it, our ability to translate what we find and our willingness to keep ecosystems and their custodians within the bargain improve together. AI may accelerate the first two, although the third still depends on institutions, law and the ordinary work of deciding who remains in the story after an idea becomes valuable.

The mound at evening


In 2018, the International Energy Agency estimated that the number of air conditioners in buildings could rise from 1.6 billion to 5.6 billion by 2050, tripling electricity demand for cooling without a large improvement in efficiency. The projection will change, but billions of people will still need cooling where capital is costly and electrical grids are strained. Harare in 1991 was therefore an early encounter with a problem much of the warmer world is only beginning to face.


By the time the offices at Eastgate empty, the building is preparing for another working day. Fans begin drawing the highveld night through the floor voids, and heat gathered in the concrete since morning travels out with the air. Tomorrow the same walls and floors will be asked to receive it again. The system is mechanical and passive, African and international, biological in its provocation and conventional in much of its physics, and its achievement becomes easier to understand once none of those parentages has to be denied.


The route from a termite mound to Eastgate passes through Harare’s climate, the price of imported machinery, the habits of local builders, an imperfect account of termite biology and the engineer’s patient testing. The kingfisher reaches a railway tunnel, and the Costa Rican specimen reaches a laboratory and eventually a patent office, by similarly indirect routes. In each case, economic value accumulates through the observation, experiment and institutional choices made along the way.


Eastgate opens onto a larger question about ecosystems whose economic value has usually been counted through whatever can be removed from them, whether timber, minerals, food, land or carbon. Another asset is harder to see because it consists of solutions for problems that may not yet have arrived. Nakatsu could not have known that years spent watching birds would become useful to a railway, and no one knows which organism carries a chemistry, structure or behaviour that a future constraint will make important. A patent appears only after an invention is recognised, while extinction can occur before anyone learns there was an invention to recognise.


Part of the innovation capacity of this century therefore lies outside the laboratory, in ecosystems that laboratories are only beginning to search. The patents nature never filed are not missing papers waiting to be found on a desk. They remain alive in mounds, forests, wings and cells, carrying value because the range of what they may yet teach us is still open.

Sources and further reading



Cover image. Eastgate Centre, Harare, photographed in 2008. Photograph by David Brazier, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sepia treatment applied for this issue.

 
 
 

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