Mussels inspire surgical glue invention
Channel: UC Berkeley
Date: 2016-06-30

UC Berkeley engineer Phillip Messersmith is happy to be learning lessons from a lowly mollusk, with the expectation that the knowledge gained will enable him and fellow physicians to prevent deaths among their youngest patients — those who haven’t been born yet.

For full story, visit: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/06/30/fetal-surgery-stands-to-advance-from-new-glues-inspired-by-mussels/

Equipped with new funding from the National Institutes of Health and a partnership with a physician known as the “father of fetal surgery,” Messersmith is making better glues for medical procedures inside the body, applying what he and others before him have learned about underwater superglue-making techniques that have been developed and elaborated upon through eons of evolution by mussels, a brainless bivalve.

Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally

Surgery footage provided by UCSF

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