BioEverything – Part 3

In 1963 there were two tracks that an electrical engineering student at Lehigh University could choose from — electronics or power. Electronics was about solid state devices such as transistors. (The Intel 4-bit 4004, now four decades old, was not to come until 1971). The “power” track was mostly about electric motors and power generation. There was no computer science program, but the university had recently acquired a GE 225 which occupied a good part of the basement floor of Packard Laboratory. Nearly every department at Lehigh began to include computer programming as part of their curricula. Some departments evolved toward strong computer orientation more rapidly than others but eventually computer science and computer engineering became formal programs of their own.

Fast forward forty years and you can see a very similar evolution occurring with regard to bioengineering. Initially “bio” was a special interest area that spread roots from the biology department into various engineering disciplines. Bioengineering has already become a structured curriculum for students interested in the intersection between engineering and biological sciences. The bioengineering faculty at Lehigh is drawn from several departments in the college of engineering and applied science and the college of arts and sciences. Bioengineering combines engineering principles with the life sciences. There are three tracks available to students. Biopharmaceutical engineering encompasses biochemistry and chemical engineering. Bioelectronics/biophotonics focuses on applications of electrical engineering and physics in bioengineering such as signal processing, biosensors, and biochips. Cell and tissue engineering straddles the fields of molecular and cell biology, materials science, mechanical and electrical engineering and encompasses biomaterials and biomechanics. Studies range from cells and tissue to organs and systems. Sound a bit different than transistors and electric motors?

I think many of us have certain things in mind when we hear the word engineering. Perhaps we think of electronic circuits, chemical interactions, structural designs, or automotive and aeronautical endeavors. The first two stories in resolve leaves a different impression. The first article was “Measuring the stiffness of a single living cell”, a story about how changes in the mechanical properties of biological cells may be a major contributing factor to the development of bone, kidney, and vascular disease. The second story was “Mending a wounded heart”, a story about how heart attacks can cause extensive scarring of the cardiac muscle tissue and how inadequate structural remodeling can be supplemented with an implanted cardiac patch composed of heart muscle cells grown on a porous polymer scaffold. A third story talks about the mechanics of  proteins — how protein molecules are made from a linear chain of amino acids that fold into a 3-D globular form. The bottom line is that engineering is not what it used to be! Engineers still design bridges and circuits but now bio-engineers are working at the molecular level to improve the quality of life by by redesigning parts of the human being and designing new components to take the place of those in our body that may have worn out.

The exciting part of all this is that engineering students with “bio” in their pedigree have a much broadened career potential including healthcare, biomedical, pharmaceutical, biomaterials, and medicine. A  new professional master’s degree program in healthcare systems engineering (HSE) in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) designed to prepare graduate students for engineering and management careers in healthcare and health related products and services companies. The increasing complexity of delivering health care with high quality and positive patient outcomes requires professionals who are trained to think in terms of systems. The Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering have urged the healthcare field to embrace systems engineering as a way to deliver safe, effective, timely, patient-centered, and efficient.

Lehigh’s Healthcare Systems Engineering program has developed relationships with Mayo Clinic, Lehigh Valley Health Network, Geisinger Health System, Saint Luke’s Health System, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Merck, and Cigna Healthcare. There are already 18 graduate students enrolled in the new HSE program and many more expressing interest.

Even more exciting is the possibility for those of us who started out back in the days of the transistors and motors and now have aging bodies that some day we will benefit from bio-engineered “components”. The implantable pacemaker was just the beginning. Bioengineering graduates will be developing pacemakers for the brain, cochlear implants for hearing deficiencies, artificial cartilage for our knees, devices to enable the blind to see, and cures for today’s incurable diseases. At some point a nanotechnology “cocktail” will bring nanobots to our internal systems to replace faulty cells with newly engineered ones. Just like computers have become ubiquitous, it is clear that bio-everything is on the horizon. Bioethics will become a larger concern but it is clear that the trend toward The Singularity is underway.

Tags: bio, bio-engineering, bioengineering, engineering, lehigh, singularity

Blogging Reflection

My friend Irving commented that he is not so sure about my conclusion in the BioEverything post that the trend toward The Singularity is underway. Irving may be right although the things going on in bioengineering seem to fit the pattern that Ray Kurzweil describes in his book. More on that another time. What got me thinking from Irving’s comment is more about blogging. Now that I have been a student in the doctoral program for a couple of months I can see quite a contrast between scholarly writing with critical thinking and the world of blogging.

In scholarly writing it is important to back your assertions and conclusions with research and to provide a citation for all the reference material that you use. It is also important to think critically about what you read and to not jump to conclusions. Various points of view that you uncover should be compared and contrasted to bring out differences. The goal is to create new knowledge by extending or enhancing what you learn from others.

Blogging is quite a different process. Although it is certainly possible to provide a reference list and citations it is generally a much more informal communications vehicle. A skeptic might call it “winging it”. I am the first to admit that the things I write in my blog are not vetted in any way. The things I say are my opinion. I have many readers who trust me as a source but it is certainly not peer reviewed. An advantage of the blog however is that an author can easily change their mind and express a new opinion as a result of learning or feedback such as was provided by Irving. My book about the Internet took me six months to write. It took the publishing process more than six months to get the book on the shelves of book stores. In the world of Internet technology a lot changes in six months. With the blog as my book follow-on I can write weekly what I have learned and include things that have changed and in some cases caused me to believe something different than what I believed at the time I wrote the book.

The first thing students are advised in the doctoral program is to avoid using Google, Wikipedia, social networking sites, or general purpose websites and instead to use the thousands of journals containing peer reviewed points of view. Fortunately, the university library provides on-line access and search tools to utilize these journals. I completely agree with the university’s point that the easy access and availability of so many search engines can provide an avenue for poor quality work. I also agree with caveat emptor. There is a lot of great information on the web and a lot of not so great and some that is completely fraudulent. The ease of creating and finding information both has risks.

With regard to the peer review process I am not sure it is perfect. Perhaps it is like the jury system. It is not perfect but it is better than the alternatives. Shattell (2010) found that slightly more than 25% of authors found peer reviews to be less than constructive. Editors revealed issues with inconsistency, insufficient feedback to the author, reviewer bias, and disrespectful tone. The Internet has created a more level playing field and it is beginning to have an impact on processes that have previously been considered sacred. I believe the peer review process is critical to the integrity of scholarly learning and to the University of Phoenix Scholar-Practitioner-Leader model but I further believe that the peer-review process will evolve by using the power of the Internet to make the process more inclusive. Dan Cohen at George Mason University (Cohen, 2010, August 23) is one of the advocates for a more open web-based approach to the review of scholarly works. The New York Times article on this subject is enlightening and I am sure there will be significant research done on the points raised in the Times story.

Cohen, P. (2010, August 23, 2010). Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review, New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html

Shattell, M. M., Chinn, P., Thomas, S. P., & Cowling, W. R., III. (2010). Authors’ and editors’ perspectives on peer review quality in three scholarly nursing journals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 42(1), 58-65. doi: 10.1111/j.1547-5069.2009.01331.x

Tags: bio-engineering, blogging, e-learning, irving wladawsky, irving wladawsky-berger, Kurzweil, peer review, peer reviewed, singularity, university

BioEverything

In 1963 there were two tracks that an electrical engineering student at Lehigh University could choose from — electronics or power. Electronics was about solid state devices such as transistors. (The Intel 4-bit 4004, was not to come until 1971). The “power” track was mostly about electric motors and power generation. There was no computer science program, but the university had recently acquired a GE 225 which occupied a good part of the basement floor of Packard Laboratory. Nearly every department at Lehigh began to include computer programming as part of their curricula. Some departments evolved toward strong computer orientation more rapidly than others but eventually computer science and computer engineering became formal programs of their own.

Fast forward forty years and you can see a very similar evolution occurring with regard to bioengineering. Initially “bio” was a special interest area that spread roots from the biology department into various engineering disciplines. Bioengineering has already become a structured curriculum for students interested in the intersection between engineering and biological sciences. The bioengineering faculty is drawn from several departments in the college of engineering and applied science and the college of arts and sciences. Bioengineering combines engineering principles with the life sciences. There are three tracks available to students. Biopharmaceutical engineering encompasses biochemistry and chemical engineering. Bioelectronics/biophotonics focuses on applications of electrical engineering and physics in bioengineering such as signal processing, biosensors, and biochips. Cell and tissue engineering straddles the fields of molecular and cell biology, materials science, mechanical and electrical engineering and encompasses biomaterials and biomechanics. Studies range from cells and tissue to organs and systems. Sound a bit different than transistors and electric motors?

This week I received a copy of resolve magazine, a biannually published magazine from the college of engineering and applied science at Lehigh. Resolve is all about a focus on Lehigh engineering.  I think many of us have certain things in mind when we hear the word engineering. Perhaps we think of electronic circuits, chemical interactions, structural and designs, or automotive and aeronautical endeavors. The first two stories in resolve leaves a different impression. The first article was “Measuring the stiffness of a single living cell”, a story about how changes in the mechanical properties of biological cells may be a major contributing factor to the development of bone, kidney, and vascular disease. The second story was “Mending a wounded heart”, a story about how heart attacks can cause extensive scarring of the cardiac muscle tissue and how inadequate structural remodeling can be supplemented with an implanted cardiac patch composed of heart muscle cells grown on a porous polymer scaffold. A third story talks about the mechanics of  proteins — how protein molecules are made from a linear chain of amino acids that fold into a 3-D globular form. The bottom line is that engineering is not what it used to be! Engineers still design bridges and circuits but now bio-engineers are working at the molecular level to improve the quality of life by by redesigning parts of the human being and designing new components to take the place of those in our body that may have worn out.

The exciting part of all this is that engineering students with “bio” in their pedigree have a much broadened career potential including healthcare, biomedical, pharmaceutical, biomaterials, and medicine. Even more exciting is the possibility for those of us who started out back in the days of the transistors and motors and now have aging bodies that some day we will benefit from bio-engineered “components”. The implantable pacemaker was just the beginning. Bioengineering graduates will be developing pacemakers for the brain, cochlear implants for hearing deficiencies, artificial cartilage for our knees, devices to enable the blind to see, and cures for today’s incurable diseases. At some point a nanotechnology “cocktail” will bring nanobots to our internal systems to replace faulty cells with newly engineered ones. Just like computers have become ubiquitous, it is clear that bio-everything is on the horizon. Bioethics will become a larger concern but it is clear that the trend toward The Singularity is underway.

Tags: bio, bio-engineering, bioengineering, engineering, lehigh, singularity