Werner Nachtigall

Werner Nachtigall (born June 7, 1934, in Saaz, Czechoslovakia) is a German zoologist and biologist.

After graduating from high school in Augsburg, he studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in the fields of natural sciences biology, physics, chemistry and geography with a diploma in Technical Biology and Bionics.

From 1959 to 1961, he was research assistant at the Radiobiology Institute in Neuherberg, later in the Zoological Institute of the University of Munich.

His research interests during this time gave rise to questions that later led to the foundation of the field of bionics in Germany.

Professor Marianne Stokholm head of the Department of Architecture & Design at Aalborg university (AAU) Denmark, writes: "The German biologist Werner Nachtigall has since the 1960s been occupied with bionics. His writing on the subject is among the best."

Nachtigall formulated ten principles which he felt should undergird bionics:

In 1967, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1969, he was appointed professor and director of the Zoological Institute of Saarland University.

The biomechanist Steven Vogel in his book Life's devices: the physical world of animals and plants, writes, "Wherever nature has a structure, biologists have been painstakingly describing it, but most often paying little attention to mechanical functions. Nachtigall (1974) went the next step, gathering a vast collection of structural schemes for attachment, classifying them by function, and comparing each with its technological analogs. Among interlocking joints he recognizes miters, rabbets, dovetails, and mortises; under releasable attachments he describes plugs and sockets, hooks and eyes, snaps, vises, forceps, anchors, suction cups, and others. The diversity defies summarization. Even velcro has its biological analog – what Nachtigall calls 'probabilistic' attachments, coatings of burrs invented repeatedly as a dispersal device for the seeds and fruits of plants. All that these latter require is gentle contact with a sufficiently irregular surface (fur perhaps originally but cloth works at least as well) and enough burrs attach to provide a surprisingly strong connection.

Velcro...represents highly successful bioemulation: its inventor Georges DeMestral, deliberately worked from the seed barbs of cocklebur and burdock."

In 1990, he initiated the field of study called "Technical Biology and Biomimetics" (which he supervised until his retirement in 2002) and also the "Society for Technical Biology and Bionics" (GTBB) of which he was the first chairman until 2003.

After his retirement in 2002, he became head of the BMBF-funded Competence Network Biomimetics BIOKON at the University of Saarland.

By making use of biostatistics, and also bringing together several scientific and engineering disciplines, his research which focused on mechanisms for movement in the animal kingdom led him to pioneer the field of bionics in Germany.

Much of his published work centres on technology in the fields of biology, flight biomechanics and general bionics.

In addition to technical scientific papers (over 300), he has published more than 30 popular books as well as articles which has stimulated interest in this emerging field.