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Pamela Silver
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Harvard University Bioengineering Engineering Biology for the 21 st Century A Plan for Bioengineering at Harvard INTRODUCTION: BROAD VISION Biology increasingly offers inspiration for engineering: living systems are robust to changing environments, can produce materials and structures that are far outside the current scope of nanotechnology, efficiently capture energy directly from the sun, transform pollutants into innocuous substances, and self-organize in many non-trivial ways. At the same time, ideas and tools embodied in physical and computer scie nces are being brought to bear upon important challenges in biology, and engineering can provide a formal platfo rm by which to bring rigor and quantification to physiology and me dicine. There is enormous potential for the transformation of bioengineering into a discipline directed toward synthesis of technologies that can have profound impact on human well-being and the future of th e planet. Bioengineering is also an exciting, deeply interdisciplinary, intellectual area that naturally integrates physical, life and information sciences. The absence of a defined Program in Bioengineering at Harvard deprives numerous students of a formal curriculum in this area, marginalizes the University in one of the major growth areas in science and health policy and limits the development of the discipline. The committee (see Appendix 1) heard of the demand to create a Bioengineering Program from students, fellows and faculty and strongly and unanimously endor sed the foundation of research and education initiatives in bioengineering. Harvard has a unique opportunity to create a program that will define bioengineering for the 21st century. We envision the Harvard University Bioengineering initiative to become a hub and a worldwide focal point of pedagogy and collaborative and translational research of life scientists and engineers working together. Th e University will bring together its schools of engineering, medicine, law, business and pub lic healthcare and polic y, to create a unique interschool bioengineering program. Such a program will lead to fundamental advances in biology, medicine and biomimetic engineering and could have an enormous impact on the well- being of the planet and the nation’s economic co mpetitiveness. Societal problems that may only be finally solved through bioengineering include an effective approach to bioenergy, using photosynthesis to directly capture and store energy in useable forms; purification of water and land using plants and microbes to detoxify comp romised sources, new appr oaches to increasing the food supply and more powerful, cheaper and globally enabled healthcare. Major intellectual threads include abstracting concepts of life to use in non-living systems, and applying engineering concepts to the design of living systems, the question of what actually constitutes life, the creation of functional hybrids between living and non-living systems, and the re- conceptualization of biology as an information science (Fig. 1).
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