One-third of the engineers at MIT now work on biological problems, according to Graham C. Walker, MIT biology professor. Yet it can be challenging for biology and engineering students to understand each other.
The divide, deeper than mere semantics, can touch on basic cultural differences, he says. "Even among top-level scientists, our fundamental ways of conducting inquiry differ, depending on our interests and training."
Teaching introductory biology to MIT undergraduates, Walker experiences the disciplinary disconnect firsthand. "It's a constant challenge," he says, "to find ways to make biology comprehensible and relevant to students who think like engineers."
Professor Walker has a $1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to figure out better ways to teach biology to engineers. MIT now has a biological engineering degree program. These are signs of the times.
Biology used to advance at a snail's pace because its tools were so primitive. The influx of talent from semiconductor engineering and other engineering disciplines has greatly sped up the rate of progress in the field and promises to speed it up by orders of magnitude in the future. The field of microfluidics chases the idea of highly automated and cheap labs on a chip.
Imagine a chip made using semiconductor processes that has lots of reaction vessels and miniature tubes and valves, all digitally controllable. No more pipettes. No petri dishes. No lab techs making mistakes from the tedium. Software will be able to carry out long experimental sequences. Computer programs with limited domain-specific artificial intelligence will even be able to generate hypotheses and carry out experiments. That's where the world of biology is going.
Pure simulation is also going to play a larger role in biological research. Rather than use real cells and real organisms an increasing fraction of biological research will take place in computer simulations using math and known rules of behavior of biological components and systems. The faster the computers become the more of all biological research will become doable in mathematical models written in software.
By Randall Parker at 2006 November 25 01:49 PM Biotech Advance Rates | TrackBackOne reason for this migration of top US engineers into biological fields, is almost certainly the outsourcing of the traditional computer and electronics jobs to the Far East. For the moment, US maintains leadership in advanced biology, but we shall wee what happens later with the competition.
Great post! I think biology needs many engineers to come in to it.
For engineers in academia, IMO another factor attracting engineers to biology is the location of the "gold", the extramural funding sources.
Academic success (tenure, promotion, salary) is increasingly predicated on the amount and consistency of extramural funding obtained. The "indirects", the percentage that the university administration garnishes as overhead from grant funds, are becoming more important for running the institution in this age of declining state taxpayer support for state supported (probably more properly called "state assisted") institutions and always having been so for private institutions. The indirect rates for many state institutions are close to 50%, meaning the investigator gets half of the awarded funds to actually do the proposed research (buy supplies, support the gradute students who really do the work, hire lab staff and so on) per the specific budget items approved by the granting agency. For many private institutions, the investigator gets one third of the funds. The overhead funds are used to fund the library, turn the lights on, run the HVAC, pay administrators, remodel labs and so on, also within fairly strict limits proscribed by the funding source. Writing proposals is a major task taking up a considerable amount of researchers' time.
Against this backdrop, the National Institutes of Health funded $28 billion of research last year while the National Science Foundation funded $5.6 billion. The NSF even includes biology while the NIH is almost all biology in the form of human health. The competition for these funds is very intense, only some 20-25% of submitted proposals being funded after rigorous peer review and ranking. Established researchers with a previous funding track record being much more successful than new faculty trying to break into the game.
As noted above, the movement of engineers into biology is great as the technology revolution is enabling rapid research advances. IMO, this funding balance will shift back toward more traditional engineering areas as the public recognizes the looming problems of fossil fuel scarcity, human-driven climate change, freshwater depletion, food scarcity and so on, moving human health to a lower priority. With looming Federal budget deficits, the total amount of federal dollars allocated to research is likely to drop significantly.
JMG3Y.. Great post with lots of interesting statistics on how grants are so important to the schools.
Your last paragraph made me think maybe the funding balance will not shift back towards the more traditional. Afterall when our material needs are taken care of, what is more important then human health? I remember stating to someone would you rather live in a 400,000$ home and be healthy... or live in a million dollar home but have lost your health? Well most people want to be healthy, after they have shelter, food and so on. And as the biology revolution enables more profound products like reversing parts of aging.. Then the argument gets even stronger.
So if there is this incredible demand, and with more skilled manpower more can be done, I think it is rational to move manpower into this area. The market's only way of doing that is through more jobs and higher compensation...
It also gets me thinking if we will start to see some of the east asian engineering power be devoted to biology. As America doesn't really produce many engineers, and the ones it does produce you need a great deal of them for the maintenance of the civilization like working in utilities.