Biological robot

The word biot, a portmanteau of "biological robot", was originally coined by Arthur C. Clarke in his 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama. The term refers to an artificial biological organism or synthetic biological organism. Biots are different from robots and cyborgs. Robots are inorganic in nature, cyborgs are a combination of mechanical parts and organic tissues, and biots are entirely organic. Biots are also different from clones. A clone is a copy of a living creature, a biot is a constructed living creature.

The authors of the Star Wars book series The New Jedi Order reprised the term biot. The Yuuzhan Vong uses the term to designate their biotechnology.

Biots appear in fiction under other names. The robots featured in Rossum's Universal Robots, the play that originally coined the term robot, are presented as artificial biological entities closer to biots than the mechanical objects that the term robot came to refer to. The replicants in the film Blade Runner are biots: they are organisms of living tissue and cells created artificially.

See also