Biotensegrity: From Dinosaur's Tails to Tea Parties

Snelson’s Needle Tower, a Tensegrity mast

In this post about the influence of gravity on living and non-living structures, I posed several questions and promised that answers would be forthcoming.  Today’s post addresses one of the questions. 

The dinosaur question wasn’t really mine to ask. It was posed around 1975 by an orthopedic surgeon who was frustrated that what he had learned in medical school and saw in anatomy books bore so little resemblance to what he saw and touched when he opened up a body to repair a damaged spine. He observed that the vertebrae were not stacked together as they appeared in the books. It was more as if they were afloat like fruit in a Jell-O salad. 

To satisfy his curiosity about how human structure, he studied books about architecture

and about patterns found in nature. He spoke with the paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.  How was it, he wondered, that dinosaurs with tails averaging eighty segments long could walk around without leaving drag tracks in the terrain? And how did they support necks that had sixteen or more vertebrae?  The specimens in the museum were so heavy that they needed to be held up by wires to the ceiling and propped from below with sturdy poles.

Diplodocus Longus

One afternoon, after visiting the museum, he sat on a bench and gazed across the Washington mall at a towering sculpture. The tower seemed suspended in the air, much like those necks and tails. The artist had discovered how to join his aluminum tubes and steel cables so that the struts seemed to float within a network of wires. Its balance of tension and compression made the sculpture light in weight but strong and adaptable to wind and other disturbances. In that moment, Dr. Stephen M. Levin understood that the human spine, like Kenneth Snelson’s Needle Tower, was a tensegrity mast.  

Snelson was a student of famous designer and systems theorist, Buckminster Fuller, and Fuller, inspired by his student’s sculpture, understood that its organizing principle could be applied to architecture. Fuller coined the word tensegrity – tensional integrity —to describe it and used it in constructing his famous geodesic domes.

Dr. Levin‘s curiosity and persistence led him to dig further into his question about human structure. If the spine was a tensegrity design, how did it get that way? This led him to study embryonic development and to investigate biologic forms in general.  Along the way, he, too, coined a new term: biotensegrity. Everywhere, at every scale, he found the same principle: tension and compression in balance—in living cells, molecules, crystals; and deeper into relationships within the tiniest particles known.

Tensegrity applied to the macro scale too—to the way the universe is organized.  Fuller had said that planets and stars were like the compression elements in Snelson‘s sculpture. Gravity was the tensional element that held everything together.

A few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of the “Biotensegri-Tea Party”, organized by people who have gathered around Levin‘s work— anatomists, mathematicians, philosophers, psychotherapists, physical therapists, doctors, and others—each finding something in the concept of biotensegrity that sheds light on their own endeavors. It was lovely to see Dr. Levin, now 93, surrounded by acolytes who are so bright, curious, enthusiastic, creative, inclusive and happy.  Last Friday they were celebrating the 50th anniversary of his epiphany.

The tea parties are posted on YouTube, including the one mentioned above.

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 © 2025 Mary Bond

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