If you ever want to gain a fresh appreciation of how well made the human body is, try building replacement parts for missing or damaged elements of the original equipment. It will require all the biology, chemistry, physics and engineering you can marshal, and then some.

In a recent Wednesday Afternoon Lecture he titled “Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering,” Dr. Antonios G. Mikos, professor in the department of bioengineering at Rice University, gave an overview of a “relatively young field” that has been around for only 20 years or so.

“The promise of the field,” however, “is no longer science fiction, but reality,” said Mikos, who holds 25 patents and has worked on biomaterials in a wide range of tissues.