Biomedical engineering resources: Problems in a cross-disciplinary science

1, INTRODUCTION (FRED ALT) WHAT is a cross-disciplinary science ? We usually speak of three distinct scientific areas o r disciplines: the social sciences, the life sciences, and the physical sciences. Until recent times these were well separated from one another. Students of social sciences seldom took physical science courses; usually, no life science courses were included in the curriculum of an engineering school. Recently, however, the walls which rigidly separated the three disciplines have started to crumble. Motion and time study engineering, for instance, has pierced the partition between management science and engineering; community studies on public health and group mental health combine social science and life science aspects. The fastest breakdown, however, occurred--and is still occurring before our eyes-between the life sciences and engineering. Here the elimination of the old dividing wall has opened up a new area now generally called "biomedical engineering". Why is this breakdown taking place now, and not a long time ago ? A few causes come immediately to mind. The rapid progress of engineering during the last few decades has attracted the a t tent ion of many life scientists. Miniaturization, for instance (made possible through transistor circuitry and micro-sized transducers), is obviously of help in biological research where the size of the objects under study may be in the micron range of the living cell. Telemetry can find immediate application where signals are to be detected from unapproachable areas such as pressure in the intestines, or physiological measurements on astronauts. The tremendous progress in the computer field has also led to many medical applications. Thus the expansion of engineering in its own right causes its surrounding walls to crack. Another cause for the opening up of the new biomedical engineering science was the striking success which many of the early engineering applications encountered. The applicability of the electron microscope to virological studies is an example. So are the early successes ofelectroencephalography which led to meaningful b r a i n mapping such as the discovery of the focal control points in the brain of the epileptic attack or of the tremor of Parkinson's disease. Application of engineering methods led to the analysis of the macromolecular structure of proteins and amino acids and hence to an entirely new viewpoint in genetics. Striking successes such as these have created intense interest among life