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Leonardo da Vinci—The First Bioengineer: Educational Innovation to Meet His Desire for Knowledge and Promote His Concept of Interdisciplinarity

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  • United Nations Program for the Development of Basic Sciences
Creative Education, 2019, 10, 1180-1191
http://www.scirp.org/journal/ce
ISSN Online: 2151-4771
ISSN Print: 2151-4755
DOI:
10.4236/ce.2019.106089 Jun. 24, 2019 1180 Creative Education
Leonardo da VinciThe First Bioengineer:
Educational Innovation to Meet His Desire for
Knowledge and Promote His Concept of
Interdisciplinarity
Ricardo Luis Armentano, Luis Kun
Department of Biological Engineering, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, República Oriental del Uruguay
Abstract
The central axis of the work has been to empower the figure of Leonardo da
Vinci 500 years after his death. With him, we wanted to infect our students
with their tireless desire to know and learn. We plant the possibility of carry-
ing out a project of educational innovation giving a push to the process of
teaching and learning by making it more participatory, cooperative and in-
terdisciplinary, as well as the desire to involve more the students encou
raging
their interest in learning and work. To honor Leonardo’s legacy and the spirit
of the Renaissance, it is necessary to teach to stimulate the critical spirit and
to encourage imagination and creativity.
Leonardo da Vinci was a prolific
hybrid innovator to unlock the secrets of human complexity for the first time
in the history of mankind amalgamating Science, Engineering, Biology and
Engineering; so, we define him as the first bioengineer of humanity.
Keywords
Creativity, Interoperability, Humanism, Engineering Education, Teaching for
Creativity, Innovation
1. Introduction
The figure of Leonardo da Vinci 500 years after his death continues to illustrate
his tireless desire to know and learn. Leonardo is the symbol of a century in
which progress impacted, shattering the thickness of dogmas. In the Quattro-
cento, the doors have definitely opened, the ideas have spread and still nourish
us, clear our path and enlighten us. The spirit of the Renaissance (Burckhardt,
1878) teaches us fervor, admiration, the strength of the critical spirit and trust in
How to cite this paper:
Armentano, R. L
.,
&
Kun, L. (2019). Leonardo da Vinci
The
First Bioengineer: Educational Innovation
to Meet His Desire for Knowledge and
Promote His Concept of Interdisciplinarity.
Creative Education
, 10,
1180-1191.
https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2019.106089
Received:
May 6, 2019
Accepted:
June 21, 2019
Published:
June 24, 2019
Copyright © 201
9 by author(s) and
Scientific
Research Publishing Inc.
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution International
License (CC BY
4.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Open Access
R. L. Armentano, L. Kun
DOI:
10.4236/ce.2019.106089 1181 Creative Education
man, and often reveals that even without realizing, there are obscurantisms that
constantly threaten man and that, even perennial, lie in ambush. Florence, in
Leonardo’s time, was the Silicon Valley of the Renaissance (Isaccson, 2017). The
famous Florentine House of the Medici, along with other similar families, fi-
nanced thinkers and creators from different fields (artists, scientists, poets and
philosophers, among others), achieved an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas
(Burke, 1999). The writer Frans Johansson called this phenomenon the Medici
Effect (Johansson, 2006), which boomed a great explosion of creativity in fif-
teenth century Italy, whose basic idea is that when you “access an intersection of
fields, disciplines or cultures, you can combine concepts existing in a large
number of new ideas”. Leonardo summed up the Renaissance ideal of the multi-
talented sage-painter, sculptor, narrator, musician, scientist, mathematician,
architect, engineer with a thirst for insatiable knowledge and curiosity (Bortolon,
1967).
From a reigning culture, most students do not learn, as they only memorize
equations, data and procedures. The core part is that students learn to manipu-
late symbols, but do not know what it means. They are not being taught to think,
but to pass the test. It is postulated that this is one of the most important reasons
for the crisis that science schools in general and engineering schools in particular
are going throughlow level of interest and problems of recruitment and reten-
tion of students. In effect, the traditional structure of engineering presents cha-
racteristics that encourage abandonment. First, knowledge is presented in isola-
tion in each discipline in completely independent courses, which is a serious
impediment to future multidisciplinary work. On the other hand, students lack
purpose, not being clear about the usefulness of the basic knowledge they receive
and being unaware of the tools and habitual ways of working in their future
profession (Armentano, 2012). This work develops the framework of the Degree
in Biological Engineering, which is a novel engineering training with solid
knowledge of biological processes and life sciences, in order to generate profes-
sionals capable of industrial development and develop the necessary equipment
to medicine and for the biotechnological and agri-food industries (Kun, 2012).
The objective of this work has been to empower the figure of Leonardo da
Vinci in the 500 years death anniversary. With him, we wanted to infect our
students with their tireless desire to know and learn. We plant the possibility of
carrying out a project of educational innovation giving a push to the process of
teaching and learning by making it more participatory, cooperative and interdis-
ciplinary, as well as the desire to involve more the students encouraging their
interest in learning and work.
2. Backgrounds
Leonardo who was born on April 15, 1452 at his father’s place in Anchiano, a
village in the small town of Vinci, summed up the Renaissance ideal of the sage
of multiple talentspainter, sculptor, narrator, musician, scientist, mathemati-
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cian, architect, engineerwith a thirst for insatiable knowledge and curiosity
(Isaccson, 2017). Leonardo died in France in 1519 and is buried in the Château
d’Amboise in the Loire Valley. The last three years of his life were spent in the
service of the king of France, Francis I (Isaccson, 2017).
Natural son of a small notary of Florence, at the age of eighteen, he mastered
huge knowledgemathematics, physics, chemistry and anatomy. Music, too, has
no secrets for him (Isaccson, 2017). His strange genius directs him to all fields of
knowledge and works that today we would call “engineering”. Very early, he re-
veals himself as a universal spirit, his vision of the world is that of a visionary in
the real world. Leonardo laid the foundations of new experimental sciences; it
moved away from mere empiricism towards concepts of the science of applied
mechanics suitable for general application in the industrial world, in that sense It
was the first modern engineer Leonardo had less influence because his writings
did not have enough diffusion and some were lost. What would have happened
if Galileo and Kepler had known them? Leonardo loves the four profession de-
serves not so much for being a practicing engineer but as a prophet of the future
of engineering and the more his legacy is studied more this great dimension of
great Florentine understood (Birkett, 2016).
Leonardo’s contributions to physiology flourished in the late 15th century
long before the scientists that we often think of as the founding fathers of our
discipline. These include Boyle, Hooke, Malpighi, Priestley, and Lavoisier. All of
these were working more than 150 yrs. after Leonardo. He also has the distinc-
tion of being the first bioengineer, that is, applying the principles of engineering
to physiology (West, 2017; Sterpetti, 2019a). Leonardo’s great innovation was to
take well-established concepts and subject them to the direct verification of
phenomena, always using his great capacity for observation, equipped with his
extraordinary ability to transform what he saw into a graphic schematic of
processes. In a certain sense, Leonardo da Vinci is somehow out-of-this-world
(Isaccson, 2017).
Leonardo has anticipated and foreshadowed with his research phenomena of
great current ecology, nuclear destruction, the use of science for war purposes,
with the limited resources available at that time. His most precious legacy is not
the 21 paintings or the almost 100,000 drawings and sketches he left, but his cre-
ation of a new way of thinking. On the other hand, their ability to interconnect
the various fields of knowledge, increasing tenfold their cognitive potential when
intertwines n, is a good example of “interdisciplinarity” (to use a modern ex-
pression) constitutes a fundamental basis for bioengineers of the present (Valen-
tinuzzi & Pallotti, 2013). But it goes far beyond these specific innovations. He
points out in his Codes of hypotheses that science will take several centuries to
verify. Intuitions that surprise us with their conceptual power and prophetic
precision (Birkett, 2016).
Leonardo was the most visionary of all the engineers (Birkett, 2016). Water is
“the blood of the Earth,” he writes, the main and essential element of the cycle in
which all forms of life are articulated. How did he come to such a conclusion? It
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is always he who affirms that man is “composed of earth, water, air and fire, like
the earthly body ()”. That all its cellular metabolism, an idea in itself totally
unthinkable at the time, is based on aqueous exchanges.
It is without a doubt the first of all ecologists! He senses that the water cycle,
both on our entire planet and on the very basis of any living organism, must be
based on an unalterable equilibrium without which we run the risk of a disaster
(Kirby et al., 1990).
In the house of Florence, which lives modestly in the shadow of the splendor
of the palaces, in the heart of the night, a description of a distant world is made
to come. For himself, because the Church does not like the creators of prophe-
cies that escaped his control.
It predicts a world in which this fundamental cycle of vital water that the
Apocalypse will threaten will be disturbed. A world where we have totally ig-
nored the deep reality of life. A world where the discoveries of science, while
they will be dazzling, will be applied in disorder (Isaccson, 2017).
Since his sixteenth century Florence, Leonardo has seen the great polluted ci-
ties of our time, he perceived the poisoning of the air, the nauseating and dan-
gerous substances that kill the oceans. And the war a terrible war, of flame
and steel, a war of which he speaks even in terms of “rupture of matter in the
most intimate elements ”. Is it not the division of the atom?
Leonardo does not ignore, in fact, that the technique of which he is one of the
most brilliant pioneers in history could be at the origin of a disaster if it were
pushed to the extreme and used in a frantic way. Whenever he feels it is too early
to give his contemporaries an idea or similar device, such or such a mechanism,
he abstains. Never a useless vanity, the desire to be recognized and celebrated
motivated him. He prefers to look sadly at the diagrams and descriptions of his
discoveries. At the risk of sometimes displeasing their powerful protectors)
(Isaccson, 2017).
Leonardo theorized that diseases derived from some imperfection in the
structure of the human body (Sterpetti, 2019b). He put in evidence that for each
disease atherosclerosis, pathology of cardiac valves, cirrhosis and portal hyper-
tension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease amongst others, there was a cor-
related anatomic change, overcoming the old theories of the diseases as unbal-
ance of the humor of the body (Sterpetti, 2019b).
Leonardo studied the dynamics of water flow in rivers, using colors to show
flow patterns, defining the voltage on the side walls of the river. It determined
with different colors flow characteristics in the center and near the edges of riv-
ers and translate these findings to the blood flowing in arteries. Leonardo re-
ceived permission to dissect cadavers at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Flo-
rence (Kerr, 1957). The notes of his diaries include detailed studies of the human
skull, human fetus, internal organs of a woman, muscles, tendons, skeletal, car-
diovascular system. Leonardo moved slowly inside the accepted theories he
learned from reading, but adapted to the new ideas, based on their own experi-
ments. The complexity of the study of the human body by the current bioengi-
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neers follow the steps of Leonardo due to they addresses many systems that in-
teract in complex and nonlinear ways. Physiological systems of human beings
interact jointly at all times to allow the body to continually adapt to the condi-
tions imposed leads to the concept of complexity to advance the understanding
of deep phenomena. Leonardo laid the first foundations of that understanding.
This work deals about Leonardo da Vinci who was a prolific hybrid innovation
to unlock the secrets of human complexity for the first time in the history so we
define him as the first bioengineer of humanity
3. Development of the Experience
In the strictly methodological aspect, it is proposed to make an introductory
course more interactive than the normal conference-type course where the
classmates become professors (Armentano, 2012) encourage the interest of our
students. It is fundamental about teaching by asking not giving the answer be-
cause the important thing is not the answer but the reasoning to reach it. It seeks
to teach students and students to THINK. Frequently the effort to retain the
Master’s words conspires against analysis, logic, and reasoning. A university
education that does not stimulate the critical spirit and that does not teach to
think is not higher education but a training to the submission. Any person
trained in a scientific education cannot be sensitive to sectarian propaganda or
intolerance of any kind whether religious, political or administrative (Armenta-
no & Kun, 2016).
The structure of the course seeks to cover the relevant topics of Biological En-
gineering and provides the basis for graduates to be astute doers, reliable inno-
vators, agents of change, main integrators, business facilitators, technology ad-
ministrators and knowledge repositories insisting that transformative changes
require a joint effort due to the enormous complexity of the interdisciplinary ac-
tivity (Kun, 2009), assuming that individual efforts are often insufficient to
overcome the challenges encountered in the classroom and in the changing en-
vironments labor (Cymberknop & Armentano, 2016).
The idea is that the academic body and students are put under appropriate
pressure and temperature levels incorporating an imprint, that acts as an impor-
tant catalyst in this reaction, assuming individual and institutional maturity to
judge and appreciate a culture that celebrates the rarity, the capacity of choice,
the independence, the entrepreneurial spirit, concentration, creativity and inten-
sity. This culture is on the other hand the great challenge of the University: to
ensure a microclimate where the best science and technology can be exercised
and at the same time to lead its students to the full development of their poten-
tial as people, as citizens and as workers; to put ideas into action; generating new
understanding concomitant to the new technological utilities, paradigm of re-
search oriented to innovation; for the good of society and to improve the lives of
people with continuous progress in quality, cost reduction and preservation of
the environment (Armentano, 2012).
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This is a mandatory course for the Freshman students. The course provides 16
credits. It’s a semester-long course. It’s a mandatory course and does not have
prerequisites (it is the first introductory course in the career). The course faculty
consists of one full professor, and 4 teaching assistants (including a medical
doctor). The teaching method is a blended learning, including classroom lec-
tures, interactive quizzes, and presentations. The students are assessed based on
their performance and participation in the activities during the course. However,
the key evaluation is through a final poster presentation at the end of the course,
where the students choose an important topic of their field of biological engi-
neering, perform a thorough literature review, and present in the form of a
poster. The students exposed the results they had investigated, achieving that
classmates become professors. A considerable improvement was evident along
the course rising the percentage of students expressing willingness to teach in-
terdisciplinary lessons in the future (Gero, 2017).
To develop this project, we set ourselves a series of objectives:
Encourage the interest of our students for a period (the Renaissance) charac-
terized by the desire for knowledge, highlighting the figure of Leonardo as a
prototype of the time.
Create a humanistic environment that promotes the existence of points of
view reciprocal and favor the acceptance of the other, according to their cus-
toms and culture.
Deal in a globalized way with different contents of different areas with the
purpose of improving teaching and learning processes.
Incorporate reading and writing as forms of personal enrichment of the students.
Encourage reflection and cooperative work of the educational team.
Search interdisciplinary resources to develop the teaching process learning.
Activities carried out to encourage the interest of our students:
1) Who was Leonardo da Vinci?
Specific objective: we try to offer the most human aspects of Leonardo’s scien-
tific, technical and artistic work, thus avoiding the danger of mythologizing the
geniuses.
2) Engineering is the engine of innovation
Specific objective: Concepts of innovative research in modern engineering
abandoning the old basic vs. applied science paradigm.
3) The body as a signal generator
Specific objective: to take signals from different places of the human body in a
non-invasive way. A Physiology laboratory where students act as subjects, mak-
ing innovative physiological measurements with non-invasive and safe means,
all under a scientific and safe methodology.
4) Learning to Innovate in Biological Engineering
Specific objective: simulations of research through examples where creativity
and innovation are the transversal axes.
List of the talks delivers where the classmates become professors in order to
encourage reflection and innovative works:
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Themes developed in the framework of this academic year 2018
- Health and technology are biocompatible.
- Description of the growth of sheep by mathematical models.
- Optogenetics: Illuminate your mind.
- Biomechanical model of the trachea for the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
- Advance and uses of electronic skin.
- Monitoring of the brain to improve quality of life.
- Prosthetics “ Low Cost”.
- Wearable Microfluidic device for the capture, storage and colorimetric analy-
sis of sweat.
- Nanotechnology: the hope of oncology.
- Re-stabilizing the rhythm: Automatic external defibrillators available to eve-
ryone.
- Application of Artificial Intelligence to the estimation of heart rate from fa-
cial videos.
- Spider silk: “The material of the future”.
- Brain-computer interface.
- Diapers inspire a new way of studying the brain.
- Otoacoustic Emissions. The power of a neonatal diagnosis.
Themes developed in the framework of this project year 2017
- Retinal prosthetics and intraocular implants to correct blindness.
- Application of thermography in the diagnosis of breast cancer.
- Molecular imaging of breasts.
- White blood hypertension of Bata Blanca and its detection.
- Mapping of the brain: research processes and importance in the scientific and
health field.
- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
- Bioinformatics at the service of pharmacovigilance.
- Artificial Heart. Ventricular assist devices.
- Da Vinci Surgery Surgical System.
- Brain/computer interface and neuroprosthetics applied to quadriplegic
people.
- Robotic surgery: its development and evolution.
- Bionic Kidney.
- Bionic Engineering: a new life opportunity.
- Cyborg Beast: The low-cost prosthetics for children.
- 3D printer as a tool in medicine.
- Print 3D ovaries and nano-robots to combat infertility.
- GPS technology in sport.
- Purification of ambient air.
- Graphene: the material of the future.
4. Discussion
Today, definitely, Leonardo would have used electronic technologies and com-
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puters. But probably he would continue to bet on the continuous torque of the
scientific and artistic dipole, which could be a special key for the advancement of
knowledge. Its integral and ubiquitous approach to the planet could be the
precedent of the phrase “Think globally, act locally” used for the first time in the
context of environmental challenges, has taken a more widespread value and use
in recent years (Kun, 2009). Education under the leitmotiv Think Globally, Act
Locally is one of the most powerful and important things in our lives and should
be taught to young students. Because everything is connected, although discon-
nected (Kun, 2010). This disconnection has a high cost, and a look into the fu-
ture predicts that most serious issues will be related to population growth and
demographics and will be due to the needs of water, food, medicine and energy,
for example, availability, production, demand, distribution, price, etc. (Armen-
tano & Kun, 2016). The solution to these situations or circumstances requires a
holistic approach, (Kun, 2014) consequence of globalization, for example, the
global economy, and above all, the encouragement of collaboration between in-
dustry, academia, the hospital environment, laboratories and government for
bringing together experts from different disciplines to investigate and meet the
specific needs of a product or service with high added value. The leitmotiv of the
new engineering is that size the power of creativity; audacity and adventure to
discover and learn from change. The great challenge of our times is to stimulate
creativity, discarding the myth that affirms that it is something magical, a natu-
ral power denied to the majority of mortals and given to only a few and that it
remains for them to imagine what never existed before. Creativity is not magic,
nor an inherent attribute of our genes, much less a supernatural blessing. It is a
capacity, and anyone can learn to be creative and get the most out of it. To pro-
voke creativity, few things are as important as the time devoted to
cross-fertilization with fields different from our areas of specialization: great ad-
vances often depend on the naive audacity of a layman (Armentano, 2012).
To honor Leonardo’s legacy we seek to re-find Leonardo’s creative spirit, cu-
riosity and imagination, sheltered by an area where artists, scientists, poets and
philosophers, among others, achieve an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas,
products, goods and services prioritizing the link from academia to work to im-
prove productivity by empowering science, technology and innovation as en-
gines of economic growth and human development. We look for the acade-
mia-industry-hospital clinics interaction, to generate sufficient resources and
obtain modern facilities in order to make more attractive a university career for
the new generations, and in this way ignite the interest to complete the universi-
ty studies. We encourage the installation of laboratories with advanced technol-
ogy to improve the quality of education in engineering and science and create
opportunities for thousands of creative young people to contribute to the inno-
vation process. Certainly, government commitment and assistance are essential
to help create and maintain the necessary ecosystem. In this global context, and
based on innovative strategic thinking, we must teach thinking to connect ideas
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and disruptive discoveries in an ecosystem that stimulates a critical mind refrac-
tory to sectarian propaganda, or any kind of intolerance: religious, political, so-
cial, cultural, economic or administrative (Armentano, 2012).
On the basis of Leonardo’s legacy and the spirit of the Renaissance, it is ne-
cessary to teach to think about the framework of the new planetary Trinity that
governs our days: globalization, westernization and development. It is to stimu-
late the critical spirit and teach to apprehend as an antidote to the factory model
education that is a training for submission. It is connecting ideas and disruptive
discoveries in an ecosystem that stimulates a critical mind refractory to sectarian
propaganda, or any kind of intolerance: religious, political, social, cultural, eco-
nomic or administrative. It is to encourage innovation and creativity as a way to
apprehend learning, entrepreneurship, communication and sharing. It is to train
young people in interdisciplinary and functional interoperability to avoid
adopting solutions based on partial knowledge of the problems, which prevents
achieving real solutions to complex problems (Kun, 2018). It is stimulating to
think of the Italian Renaissance as a form of intellectual revolution in an unsta-
ble environment, where criticism of the old theories represented was not only an
offense to tradition, but also a threat to established power. Vinci appears in this
paradoxical movement as a beacon on this night, a tenacious and stable bright-
ness; the genius of all geniuses. Leonardo knows of the hostilities engendered by
all novelty, the panic that any questioning of the established world can unleash.
He possesses the unbridled strength of freedom that man must always conquer,
tenaciously maintaining the creative ardor and the fierce need to know, not to
leave the world as it is, but to change it. It was not easy for Leonardo to express
his bold ideas freely in the tumultuous environment of the Italian Renaissance
and that is why his figures come. His life is still a great puzzle that has not yet
been fitted, and there are still many things to discover. It would take immense
erudition. There are thousands of pamphlets written from right to left, blue-
prints, sketches, diagrams, sketches that sleep in several large libraries of the
world. No one has dared to bring them together to make a vast synthesis of this
enormous material in suspense that one does not stop wondering how a man,
who is also one of the greatest universal painters, has been able to accumulate it
during a simple life. It is possible that Leonardo, for the oneiric dimension of his
research, still surpasses us.
As we celebrate 500 years of Da Vinci’s life it is worth connecting all those
outcomes from his incredible life, to who this man actually was and how he was
able to achieve everything he did. According to multiple sources and his biogra-
phy Leonardo was an illegitimate child, dyslexic, illiterate, bipolar and with at-
tention deficit disorder. It is obvious then that his curiosity, his observation ca-
pacity, his sacrifice and particularly his perseverance driven by his passion ac-
count for his successes, regardless of the amount of times that he failed trying.
According to Richard Branson, “bipolar” is not simply a “disorder”. It is a
symptom of high levels of creativity and energy; and it is found in most geniuses,
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i.e., Isaac Newton, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, etc. Hyper focus is a natural asset of
bipolar disorder when it’s aroused. Leonardo’s testament is a refreshing remind-
er to the human race, that despite the difficulties that he encountered and that
humans may face throughout a lifetime, the important thing is to keep trying.
Later, the accomplishments achieved can eclipse forever the failures experienced
along the way. We are reminded a quote by Einstein: Imagination is more im-
portant than Knowledge” (Maxwell, 2003). Leonardo da Vinci’s imagination was
extraordinary and so were the talents that he developed throughout his life. One
of Leonardo’s most important lessons is that failure and how we handle failure is
what forms us as humans. A hybrid is a combined product of elements of dif-
ferent nature. Leonardo was a true hybrid in all senses. And that’s very impor-
tant because he obtained a solid training that had enabled him to address things
that did not exist in the society in which he lived.
Ecosystems that foster creativity and innovation will be those who will ensure
the development of these innovative environments, which was already a reality
for at least 500 years in Florence Renaissance. Also in the Montmartre of the 20
where Picasso, Modigliani, and a host of creators who made a quantum change
in the arts and in the Greenwich Village 60 with Bod Dylan as flagship made
ecosystems that fostered creativity. We must turn this explosion of creative ideas
and expose ourselves to the intersection of fields as individuals, teams or organ-
izations. These fields can be disciplines, cultures, domains in which one specia-
lizes through education, work, hobbies, traditions and life experiences. Today we
can see similar cases in large innovation centers like Silicon Valley and Israel as
start-up nation.
Dr. Rene Favaloro, the famous Argentine cardiovascular surgeon who revolu-
tionized the field with his pioneering contributions, among which the most out-
standing was the standardization of bypass surgery coronary artery, first per-
formed in 1967, mentored us on the road of hybrid engineering (Armentano &
Kun, 2016). It was located in the techno-space between biology, medicine and
engineering, made by those paired with creative thinking and interoperable
strategies, becoming a facilitator of technological innovation with the scientific
Medici effect. Dr. Favaloro held and nurtured an interdisciplinary group of
young students, engineers, doctors, physicists, physiologists, veterinarians, ma-
thematicians and other specialists under appropriate levels of pressure and tem-
perature.
5. Conclusion
Leonardo was an example of hybridization, and at the time it was shown that if
you put people to work together in the same discipline, will be adding know-
ledge, but instead if people from different disciplines come together, rather than
adding, what is being done is multiplying the probabilities that the result of the
joint work is innovative. Leonardo da Vinci was a prolific hybrid innovation to
unlock the secrets of human complexity for the first time in the history of man-
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kind amalgamating Science, Engineering, Biology and Engineering; so we define
him as the first bioengineer of humanity.
Our advice to young people is to look for connections where you never
thought existed, and to integrate and innovate. Take a step back and see the big
picture and remember that simplicity yields complexity. To honor Leonardo’s
legacy and the spirit of the Renaissance, it is necessary to teach to stimulate the
critical spirit and to encourage imagination and creativity. It is connecting ideas
and disruptive discoveries in an ecosystem that stimulates a critical mind refrac-
tory to sectarian propaganda, or any kind of intolerance: religious, political, so-
cial, cultural, economic or administrative.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge Parag Chatterjee for his helpful contribu-
tions revising the manuscript.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this pa-
per.
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... 3 Yet, we can learn countless lessons from this epitome of uomo universalis. His work illustrates the potency arising from the intersection of art, science, and technology, showcasing the effectiveness of interdisciplinarity. 4 If we learn to regain our childlike wonder, attentively observe, connect our imagination to our intellect, transcend disciplines, and experiment to learn, we can "change" the world around us. This is what the Da Vinci Project at Utrecht University (UU, The Netherlands) aims at, to empower undergraduates to drive fundamental change. ...
... 4. Students take ownership over learning process. 4. Students hesitate to reach out to stakeholders for feedback, which requires persistent mentors to encourage students. ...
... With his many skills, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is often described as a man who has "learned much" (from the Greek word polymathes) [1,3,4]. The emphasis is "learned much in different fields of study", which highlights the time when the accumulation of knowledge was more generalized, and perhaps, scholars were free to pursue whatever fields that interest them. ...
... After all, Socrates introduced the so-called Socratic interview (Krošlák, 2012) where he examined assumptions and sought evidence, analysed the statements and uncovered contradictions. It is not surprising that critical thinking, although they did not call their studies so directly, was also employed by such personalities as Darwin (Darwin, 1887), Machiavelli (Harrison, 2009), Leonardo da Vinci (Armentano & Kun, 2019), and Thomas Aquinas (Dancák, 2016). In general, critical thinking can be defined as the ability to create one's own opinion based on the experience and knowledge gained. ...
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... 2 the domains of engineering and life sciences and leading toward an enhanced learning experience for the students, providing them with state-of-the-art transferable skills to enable them to excel in a career in life sciences [13]. Given the importance and global demand for skilled professionals in the life sciences, it has been essential for the graduates to possess the necessary skills even beyond the usual curriculum of biology, which would facilitate them to continue their career in a concrete way. ...
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