Nervous system
Nervous systems are found in most multicellular animals, but vary greatly in complexity. The only multicellular animals that have no nervous system at all are sponges, placozoans, and mesozoans, which have very simple body plans. The nervous systems of the radially symmetric organisms ctenophores (comb jellies) and cnidarians (which include anemones, hydras, corals and jellyfish) consist of a diffuse nerve net. All other animal species, with the exception of a few types of worm, have a nervous system containing a brain, a central cord (or two cords running in parallel), and nerves radiating from the brain and central cord. The size of the nervous system ranges from a few hundred cells in the simplest worms, to around 300 billion cells in African elephants.
John Dabiri
Reverse engineering is Dabiri's newest research focus. In July 2012, a team composed of Caltech and Harvard students and professors published a paper that outlined a tissue engineering method for building a jellyfish out of rat heart muscle cells and a silicon polymer. On a basic level, the function of a jellyfish - using a muscle to pump a fluid - "is similar to that of a human heart, which makes the animal a good biological system to analyze for use in tissue engineering." The next step this research will take is towards a self-sustaining prototype - one that can gather food and activate muscular contractions internally.