"From Davis’ law to modern mechanobiology: how mechanics governs growth of soft biological tissues"
11.02.2019 von 17:15 bis 18:00
Scholars have been aware of the important link between mechanics and biology at least since Galileo Galilei published his landmark “Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche Intorno a Due Nuove Scienze” in 1638. For a long time, however, this link was conceptualized as something static. Only in 1867 Henry Gassett Davis postulated that living soft tissue can dynamically adapt to a changing mechanical environment. The famous “Davis’ law”, in which he summarized his observations, may be the considered the starting point of modern mechanobiology, an emerging discipline that has attracted rapidly increasing attention over the last two decades and forms an important basis for further advances in bio- and biomedical engineering. This talk briefly reviews our current understanding of the link between mechanics and biology in load-bearing soft tissues on the organ-scale and discusses how this understanding can be expressed by a handful of mathematical assumptions and equations.