"The biological revolution demands an engineering revolution … one in which all of engineering needs to participate," proposed Georgia Tech professor Robert M. Nerem in a presentation in 2004.

Nerem, director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and distinguished chair for Engineering in Medicine, gave a presentation entitled "The Biological Revolution: Too Important to Be Left to the Biologists; Too Important to Be Left to the Bioengineers" to the American Society for Engineering, noting that jobs for bioengineers even in 2004 were increasing and that new departments were being formed to fill the need.

Bioengineering is the application of engineering principles to the study and control of biological processes, the goal of which is to develop, through an integration of engineering and the life sciences, a better understanding of basic mechanisms in disease and new concepts and techniques that may be applied to problems in medicine and biology. Applicable areas include the development of new, advanced medical devices and implants, mechanical testing of biological tissues, and engineering of unique tissue properties.

This in mind, engineers may want to consider learning more biology, as biotechnology is "opening up new opportunities for engineers in the manufacturing realm," notes automation organization ISA's InTech in "Bone Up on Bio".

According to the U.S. Labor Department, engineering jobs in the health service and medical instrument industries are forecast to increase by 33.4 percent from 1998 to 2008, while the overall demand for engineers in all industries will increase only by 19.9 percent.

Looking further ahead, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics provides these estimates from late in 2005 (the numbers are in thousands):

If you accept that the BLS's category of "Healthcare & Technical" encompasses bioengineering, then the high demand becomes apparent. Considering our aging population, and thus greater attention to health care, this trend seems realistic. Health care today is largely health science, because once a patient describes his or her symptoms, health care providers test many bodily functions and fluids/gases to support or invalidate hypotheses. In short, health science is largely applied physiology — a subcategory of biology, microbiology and chemistry.

And someone has to design medical devices and manufacturing processes that will result in new medications.

"If you understand the science, you can improve the process from an innovation point of view," Roddy Martin, vice president and general manager of value chain strategies at AMR Research, tells InTech.

If you're an engineer, you probably excel in math and physics. After all, engineering is applied physics. Once you have an answer to a math problem, you know whether it's the best answer because when you substitute numbers for variables into the equation, it balances. Because the number of people who have the special kind of intelligence to solve challenging math and physics problems easily is limited, your skills are in demand.

There is even greater demand for engineers who can apply these skills for organizations involved with processing biologicals.

Consider Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese's "Biology's Next Revolution" (Cached copy here). Put simply, our understanding of how to manipulate and alter microbes has led to health-care treatments and other advances that help us improve our lifestyle. Horizontal gene transfer has and will continue to open many doors for new products. Most of these products will require scale-up, controlling processing and supply chain management — tasks at which engineers excel.

Or consider Joel Pel's take on the engineering mindset. Pel, who authored "The Evolution of Design: Engineering Enters the Biological Revolution" in a recent issue of The Science Creative Quarterly, believes engineers tend to use a "bottom-up" approach during an investigation. He offers this illustration:

(Here I'm using the computer as my system of interest, but it could just as easily be a recently discovered organism, for example). If an engineer were presented with a computer and asked to figure out what it does and how it works (assuming no prior knowledge), she would most likely end up taking it all apart. She would then proceed to find out what each individual part does before reassembling it and finding out what everything does put together.

On the other hand, a biologist might begin the same investigation by unplugging the monitor, then the mouse, pulling out the hard drive and so on, until the aspect of the computer he was interested in stopped working. He may then put in a different hard drive, attach a new mouse and find a completely different monitor to see what the resulting changes produce. "This can give some big-picture understanding reasonably quickly," Pel says, "but it can be difficult to get to the low-level pieces."

Moreover, Pel makes no judgment on which approach is better. Rather, he suggests using both approaches to investigate.

In response to a couple of IMT posts last year, many engineering readers noted increased experience of layoffs, difficulty attaining engineering positions, or increased disappointment in the knowledge that your salary is disproportionate with your education, knowledge, skills and experience.

Specializing in bioengineering — combining engineering training with additional biology knowledge — may make engineers more marketable. Then again, how many engineers are afforded the opportunity to go back to school in addition to their current responsibilities?

Resources

Bone Up on Bio
by Ellen Fussell Policastro
InTech, Feb. 1, 2007

The Evolution of Design: Engineering Enters the Biological Revolution
by Joel Pel
The Science Creative Quarterly, January-March 2007

Biology's Next Revolution (from Nature)
by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese
Nature (via Perpetual Draft), Jan. 24, 2007

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University
by Karen M. Haberstroh and Thomas J. Webster, 2003; last updated: June 21, 2006

Table: Employment by major occupational group, 2004 and projected 2014
Office of Occupational Statistics and Employment Projections
United States Department of Labor, Dec. 7, 2005

The Biological Revolution: Too Important to Be Left to the Biologists; Too Important to Be Left to the Bioengineers
by Robert M. Nerem
American Society for Engineering Education, 2004