Flip-flop, it is interesting to understand how Biomedical engineering is evolving around in lets say another decade. Though it looks promising but I also urge to look at this article that was published in Science couple of weeks ago and decide before pursing career…..(don’t consider it as my pessimism, but something as an insinuation to make better decision)
News Focus
BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING:
Spending Itself Out of Existence, Whitaker Brings a Field to Life
David Grimm
The Whitaker Foundation took on the job of turning a fledgling field into a scientific heavyweight--and succeeded. But what happens to biomedical engineering now?
Bioengineer Sangeeta Bhatia and the Whitaker Foundation are scientific soul mates. As a graduate student in a joint M.D.-Ph.D. program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University in the 1990s, Bhatia attended the Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology, an interdisciplinary program for scientists and engineers in the Boston area that the foundation began funding in 1979. After graduation, Bhatia received a Whitaker young investigator's grant to set up her lab at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), a school that has received $23 million from the foundation to build up its biomedical engineering department.
"The Whitaker award allowed me to get my very first piece of equipment and hire a graduate student," says Bhatia, now an associate professor at MIT. "It helped me launch my entire research program."
There and back again. Thanks to Whitaker funding, Sangeeta Bhatia has returned to MIT as an associate professor.
CREDIT: MARIO CASAL/HST
With grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), Bhatia appears well along the road to a successful academic career. And that's fortunate, as Whitaker is on the road to oblivion. In June, the foundation will shut its doors after 30 years and more than $800 million in scientific philanthropy. During its lifetime, the Arlington, Virginia-based foundation has invested in thousands of young faculty members and graduate students and built hundreds of laboratories. That investment has transformed biomedical engineering from a barely recognized discipline into one of the most popular science majors in the United States.
"Their impact is almost immeasurable," says Frank Yin, president of the Biomedical Engineering Society and chair of the biomedical engineering department at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. "Whitaker put biomedical engineering on the map."
As remarkable as its largess is the way Whitaker spent it. "Most foundations focus on a problem--such as world hunger--and anyone who has a tool to address this problem qualifies for funding," says Thomas Skalak, chair of the biomedical engineering department at the University of Virginia (UVA) in Charlottesville. "Whitaker was unique in that it tried to establish the permanence of a particular field. And it knew that to do this, it would need to build up the field's infrastructure." That thrust benefited young and promising scientists such as Bhatia, whom the foundation regarded as the future of the discipline.
But will biomedical engineering continue to thrive when Whitaker leaves the scene? Some fear programs that have just begun to blossom under Whitaker's care may wilt. Others are concerned that some young faculty members could be orphaned without Whitaker's support, stunting the entire field. And still others worry that the foundation may have overbuilt the field's academic structure, creating more departments than the discipline can maintain. "The changes over the next few years could be pretty dramatic," Yin predicts.
Going for broke
The Whitaker Foundation was never supposed to last forever. Its founder, U. A. Whitaker--an engineer and CEO of a company that manufactured electronic connectors--hoped the foundation would fold within 40 years of his death in 1975. "He hated bureaucracy," says Whitaker President Peter Katona. "He felt that a foundation wouldn't accomplish its mission if it went after that mission forever."
Despite those concerns, Whitaker operated much like any other charitable organization in its early years. It spent about 10% of its capital annually (about $14 million) fostering collaborations between biologists and engineers to develop medical devices. Most of the money was channeled into 3-to-4-year grants to new faculty members such as Bhatia.
Like most biomedical engineers, Bhatia avoided a lengthy postdoc and moved directly into an assistant professorship. But there was a tradeoff: The quick transition prevented her from gathering enough research data to feel comfortable submitting a grant proposal to NIH. Another handicap was the project itself: designing a cartridge filled with liver cells that would help filter blood in patients with kidney failure. Its large engineering component, she felt, meant it "would never fly at the NIH." But once Bhatia had received the Whitaker award, she had the wherewithal to pitch a successful application first to NIH and later to NSF.
Although Whitaker's board was happy with the return on modest investments such as this, in 1991 it decided to go for broke. "The governing board wanted to increase the impact of the foundation when the field was at the cusp of becoming mainstream," says Katona. "They knew the only way to do this was to spend big bucks."
Ironically, exhausting the $200 million endowment proved harder than expected. Over the next 4 years, the foundation's assets more than doubled, thanks to the stock market boom. By the end of the decade, its annual payout of more than $60 million matched that of charities with an endowment of $1.2 billion.
One goal was to create thriving bioengineering departments at top U.S. universities. That's what happened at UCSD, whose program in 1988 consisted of six faculty members on half a floor of a medical school building. In 1993, Whitaker awarded the university $5 million to hire more professors and develop core facilities. Four years later, the foundation gave UCSD $18 million for a bioengineering building.
"The building brought together faculty and staff for the first time and really transformed the university into a national powerhouse for bioengineering," says Bhatia, who was hired under the first award. Today, UCSD has an official bioengineering department with 18 faculty members, 150 graduate students, and 1000 undergraduate majors--triple the pre-Whitaker numbers. U.S. News & World Report ranks the department second in the nation; before Whitaker, it wasn't even on the radar.
Dozens of schools can tell similar stories. Since 1991, the number of biomedical engineering departments in the United States has soared from 27 to 74, with accompanying increases in the number of undergraduates and graduate students.
Whitaker's smaller awards have made a big difference as well, says Skalak. At UVA, two $1 million awards allowed his department to create new biomedical engineering courses and establish dedicated lecture halls. Bhatia used similar awards at UCSD to write the first undergraduate textbook on tissue engineering and to help develop a Web site that allows all UC students to take biomedical engineering classes online. "Whitaker realized that these tools would help grow biomedical engineering as a discipline and were vital to the field's future," she says.
Engineering change
With Whitaker folding its tent, biomedical engineers are wondering if the field can continue to thrive. "There's a lot of trepidation in the field about what will happen now," says Bhatia. Thanks to the foundation's emphasis on infrastructure, the number of biomedical engineers continues to increase, even as funding remains static. But the field will also need to cope with the decline in start-up funding for new biomedical engineering faculty members, a $275 million program that over the past 15 years has given out 80 to 100 awards annually. "The loss of these awards is going to make it difficult for new professors," admits Katona, who says he'd much rather be entering the field 3 to 4 years ago than today.
The Miami, Florida-based Wallace H. Coulter Foundation offers early career awards in bioengineering, but they provide less money and last only 2 years. A better candidate to fill Whitaker's shoes is the 5-year-old, $300-million-a-year National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). Aware of the needs of new investigators, NIBIB gives their grant applications a 5% bonus in merit reviews. "The idea is to cut new professors extra slack so they'll have an easier time getting funded," says Deputy Director Belinda Seto.
Bioengineering boom. The number of U.S. biomedical engineering departments has skyrocketed thanks to Whitaker's sustained investment.
Big winners. With $18 million for its bioengineering building (inset), the University of California, San Diego, leads the list of Whitaker institutional award winners.
CREDITS: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO (INSET); SOURCE: WHITAKER FOUNDATION
Thanks to the policy, Seto says seven additional biomedical engineering faculty members qualified for basic R01 grants last year, bringing the total to 24. In addition, she says young investigators can apply for exploratory R21 grants, which don't require preliminary research data and confer an average of $350,000 for 2 years. In 2005, 39 of these awards went to new faculty members.
Robert Nerem, director of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, worries that such policies won't be enough. The R21s are too short, he says, and both he and Yin say that most of NIBIB's funding goes toward clinical imaging research rather than biomedical engineering. In addition, Nerem notes that NIBIB has one of the lowest applicant success rates at NIH. "So far, NIBIB has not stepped up to the plate," he says.
Another concern is that Whitaker may have overbuilt the field's academic structure, says Nerem. "Was building 60, 70, 80 departments really the right strategy?" he asks. The number of biomedical engineers graduating from many smaller schools may contribute to an oversupply in the short term, he says. That could eventually lead to a Darwinian crunch that hurts the smaller departments.
As the chair of one such department, Michael Neuman of Michigan Technological University in Houghton admits "Whitaker took a bit of a gamble with us" because of the school's isolated location on Michigan's upper peninsula, the lack of a nearby medical school, and its small life sciences program. To survive, Neuman says that programs such as his may have to change their focus from research to teaching, qualifying them for a larger university allocation based on class enrollments.
Yin expects other changes as well. As fewer faculty positions open up, graduates may find themselves doing longer postdocs, and more biomedical engineers may begin moving into new areas. Neuman has begun to see some of this already at Michigan Tech. A recent graduate joined the automotive industry and is studying the biomechanics of car accidents, he says. And a former student of Neuman's is a child abuse counselor who uses her education to assess, for example, whether a child really got his injuries from falling down a flight of stairs.
Although Whitaker may not have foreseen these changes, Katona, the foundation's president, is happy with the community's response. "I like the idea that some universities will do things differently and that not everyone is taking the same career path," he says. "We've done our job. … Now it's up to the field to have a midcourse correction if necessary."
Despite the challenges, Bhatia is optimistic that the interdisciplinary approach that permeates biomedical engineering and the growing demand for new medical technology will help sustain the field. Her new project uses nanoparticles to target drugs to tumors--the precise mixture of biology and engineering that Whitaker has tried so hard to foster. "Whitaker got us to this point by taking a risk," says Bhatia. "Now we must evolve without them."
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