Jane Rossowski, age 11, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, for her question:

What are bionics?

A flighty old legend of ancient Greece tells of Icarus who studied the construction of bird wings and learned, or almost learned, to fly. He made himself two great wings and took off from a high cliff. But the wax he used to stick on his feathers melted as he flew to close to the sun and poor Icarus plunged into the sea. This dismal failure was an early experi¬ment in bionics    the study of living things to enhance the life of man. Modern experts in bionics study how nature solves problems for different creatures. It borrows the basic ideas and adapts them to solve similar human problems. Ages after the fate of poor Icarus, a British airplane designer studied the flight of the sea gulls to create the Spitfire    the little plane that held at bay the might of Hitler's Luftwaffe.

Nowadays, we are giving a great deal of attention to the fairly new science of bionics. A project begins with a team of biologists who study some creature than happens to have some unusual feature, usually one that we humans do not have. The field is full of surprises. It also has yielded some amazing rewards in medical science and, of all things, in engineering. Many surprises have popped up from studies of creatures that produce poisonous venoms. Venom from the hideous toadfish has been chemically adapted to create a drug that lowers blood pressure.

Australians have developed useful drugs from several of their reef dwellers. They have developed several relaxing drugs from certain mollusks. You might say that bionics used mussels to relax human muscles    a trick that someday may lead to a cure for muscular distrophy. Other experts are interested in certain sponges that produce a special substance that annihilates invading bacteria. This bionics material may become a useful anti bacterial drug for human patients. In other areas of the bionics field, mice are used to study the secrets of leukemia. Rats and guinea pigs, chickens and their eggs, monkeys and other lab animals are serving to create vaccines and    to help solve the multitude of human diseases.

Bioengineers study bionics to make better gadgets. They learned to create a super aerial camera from the workings of the amazing eye of the beetle. They study the built in radar of bats because it is superior to our radar systems. The biological sonar used by the porpoise is far superior to the sonar systems we use to probe the ocean depths. All these bionics projects study nature's secrets and adapt her age old ideas to human needs.

One of the most interesting areas of bionics is a sort of merger of medicine and engineering. Most of us are fascinated by those life saving gadgets    such as the iron lung, the artifical kidney and the man made pace setter that keeps a faulty heart beating to the right rhythm. Biology teams first learn how nature performs these duties in humans or living animals. Then engineers adapt and copy her basic ideas. But so far, their electronic and mechanical substitutes are much clumsier than nature's neat biological systems.