The movable press was a product and a harbinger of a new age of knowledge in Europe: commercial, expansive, urban, adventurous. It befitted a new world which was both much larger and much smaller: its horizons extended well beyond what could be imagined just decades earlier, but what lay beyond those horizons was now reachable and negotiable. Yet perhaps the most resounding impact of the press was close to home: it shook the foundations of the European institution of knowledge, the Catholic Church.

A metamorphic rock is one that has been changed from its original igneous or sedimentary form: it has grown new minerals in response to new physical or chemical conditions. A wide variety of processes can cause changes to the mineralogical composition of rocks, including heating, burial, deformation, fluid infiltration or shocks caused by meteorites hitting the Earth’s surface. Most of these processes, and thus the formation of the vast majority of metamorphic rocks on Earth, take place near tectonic plate margins. As a result, metamorphic rocks provide us with a record of the ambient crustal conditions as rocks get buried, deformed, transformed into new varieties and then transported back up to the surface by a combination of tectonic and surface processes.

The understanding of double helix structure has brought revolution to the fields of molecular biology and genetics. The structural properties of DNA such as specific base pairing, a combination of stiffness and flexibility as well as remarkable stability (see Chapter 3) have made a huge impact in fields ranging from drug delivery to sensor design. With increased availability of chemically synthesised DNA strands and developments of super-resolution microscopy, DNA nanotechnology established itself as an independent area of research within bionanotechnology. DNA nanotechnology uses DNA as a versatile building block rather than a genetic code carrier. Although the genetic information of DNA was recognised soon after the discovery of the double helix in the 1950s, the potential of DNA assembly for the design of programmable structures was for the first time hinted in a theoretical paper written by Ned Seeman in 1982 (Seeman, 1982). His early theoretical work was followed by experimental studies that demonstrated the programmability of short DNA strands and their use for self-assembly of larger ordered structures.

Disregard, for the moment, all you have been taught and consider the following question, relying only on what you have actually observed: when you look up at the sky, what do you see? The answer is not as straightforward as one might expect.

You may start by answering: ‘it depends.’ During the day, we see the Sun. During the night, we see the stars. Most of us live in cities, so we don’t see many of them, but it only takes a short ride out of town and a bright, moonless night to observe the sky as the ancients did: full of literally countless stars. The Moon is a bit of a mystery: although it usually appears during the night, we have all, on occasion, seen it by day.

Leaving the protective confines of the university for the glamour of the court ended up costing Galileo his freedom, but it wasn’t merely a reckless career move. Galileo did have a powerful idea of himself as a philosopher, making unreserved claims about the make-up of nature – claims that his university rank as a mathematician didn’t allow. Like Kepler, however, he didn’t intend to forsake mathematics for philosophy. His project, rather, was to submit the philosophy of nature to mathematics: to claim mathematical foundations for nature and thus designate the mathematician as its most skilled and authoritative interpreter.

Putting the experimental ideology of the Royal Society into practice was the role assigned to Robert Hooke (1635–1703) – perhaps the first person whose entire career was defined by the institutions and practices of the New Science he helped shape.

He was born on the Isle of Wight in the south of the English Channel to Cecil Gyles and her husband John Hooke, a Church of England priest. These were origins at once respectable and peripheral: on the Isle, his family was notable enough to move in the circles surrounding the court of the embattled King Charles when it found itself in exile there in 1647. When his father died in 1648, however, the 13-year-old Hooke took his small inheritance and went to London.

Before we start looking into modification of nanomaterials and nanostructuring of biomolecular elements for various applications in biomedicine and material design, we need to get a glimpse into the structure of biomolecular building blocks and the way they interact and assemble.

In Chapter 6 we explored the field of DNA nanotechnology, and the use of nucleic acids to create programmable architectures on a nanoscale. In this chapter, we will look at other biomolecules and biological structures, which inspired the design of novel materials and devices. Although they can operate on a wide range of scales, going from nano to macro, all biosystems have one thing in common: they are the product of millions of years of evolution. They have been adapted to address a particular environmental challenge, such as the emergence of a new predator or the abundance of a particular nutrient or building block. For example, without an increase in the concentration of silicate and carbonate ions in water during the Cambrian period some 500 million years ago, there would have not been a dramatic increase in the number of marine creatures with silica and carbonate hard shells (Peters, 2012).

Some of the most important outcomes that emerge from the study of metamorphic rocks are the insights they provide into the past thermal structure and tectonic behaviour of the Earth. In order for metamorphic rocks to form, their protoliths must have become buried and heated. In order for us to be able to study them at the surface today, they must have been brought back to the surface in such a way that they preserve the mineralogical evidence for their history. Together, the evidence for these events document how the Earth’s crust has operated at different periods of geological time.