'New' Bioinspiration?

There is an interesting account of 'biotechnology' scientists taking inspiration from the feet of geckos and nematocysts of jellyfish to solve medical dilemmas such as developing to glue to repair a hole in a beating heart or to make a device to 'collect' persisting cancer cells in passing blood of 'cured' patients (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/25/bioinspiration-thrilling-new-science-could-transform-medicine). These are certainly important developments but the idea of finding solutions to human problems in areas of 'pure Biology' is by no means new. Some 40 years ago, I remember sitting through a Swansea lecture by Ernst Chain (a co-recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on the purification and mass production of penicillin) who made exactly the same point (that nature often has developed solutions to problems and, if you know where to look, you can sometimes adapt them for medical problems). I think that the 'take home message' is that pure research, rather than being ivory tower activity, often yields greater advances than applied efforts.