Talk:Bioengineering

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Please note:

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Relationship to Agricultural Engineering

Biological/Biosystems/Bioresource Engineering, for all intensive purposes is simply a renaming of Agricultural Engineering. In fact, when I was studying Agricultural Engineering in university, we came back after one summer break to find the course names changed to Biological Engineering, etc... There have been some changes in the dicipline in the last 20 years with a broader focus than just the biological systems relating to agriculture. The name change is more for "poltical correctness" as Ag. Engineers had found themselves working in diverse fields such as biomedical engineering, aquacultural engineering, food processing, waste treatment, etc... I often have trouble explaining to others exactly what my training is, suffice it to say that at university I took classes with civils, mechs, and chemical engineers. I would say the dicipline is a combination of the heat/mass transfer and processing end of chemical engineering, the classic machine design, HVAC, and controls of mechanical engineering, and the soils and light wood structures portion of civil. Some studies unique to Bioengineering are: negative pressure HVAC, irrigation/drainage engineering, biomechanics, machine-plant/soil interaction. There needs to be some sort of combination/connection to the Agricultural Engineering article. --Mf135gas 06:21, 3 December 2005 (UTC)


I think that this article is regarding the term bioengineering as it relates to the application of engineering to the solution of medical problems. This would exclude topics on irrigation/drainage, HVAC, etc. and focus on tissue engineering, neural engineering, prosthesis, etc. What you are referring to is still called mainly agricultural engineering, bioresource engineering, and agricultural engineering. I would consider these separate fields.

I placed the merge tag because, at least in the US, bioengineering and biomedical engineering are terms that are used with little distinction between the two. Is there a source? This may come from the use of the term "bioengineered" to refer to food that has been genetically modified, when in reality these techniques rely mostly on molecular biology than engineering techniques.

--ChrisTN 04:04, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I would agree that what I am referring to is still mainly referred as Ag. Engineering by the un-informed public. However, as a profession we have adopted the name Bioengineering to refer to the discipline engineering formerly known as Ag Engineering, but also includes all branches of engineering that relate to biological systems. For instance, the national organisation for Bioengineering in Canada is: [1], formerly known as CSAE up until the annual general meeting last year. Our sister institution in the US also changed its name last year. The ASAE is now the ASABE: [2]. It is not uncommon to find someone holding a degree in Bioengineering, who studied irrigation at one point in their undergrad life now working on degisn of human prosthetics. Biomedical engineering is a sub-discipline of Biological engineering, but is really a multi-disciplinary field also involving Medical professionals. Bioengineering is a very diverse field, required syllabus, at least in Canadian Universities (a lot of American ones from what I understand too) includes everything from classical biology to control engineering (root locus, state-space analysis and all that fun stuff). There does definitly need to be some sort of distinction between Bioengineering and "genetic engineering" which is not a discipline of engineering.

A good side note here is the study of environmental engineering which, has become a buzz in the last number of years. In most universities it is a branch of civil engineering, which is odd seeing as how most of the civil profs have backgrounds in reenforced conrete or traffic control and have never taken a microbiology, or transport phenomena course beyond Darcy's equation. Part of the thrust behind the name change from Ag. Engineering to Bioengineering was the feeling that the emerging discipline of Environmental Engineering was "coopted" from Ag. Engineering.

I don't mean this to be a bit of a tirade, although it is ironic as a member CSAE I voted against the whole name change. Hope this makes sense.--Mf135gas 03:42, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I do not think that the articles of bioengineering and biomedical engineering should be put within the same article. Unless biomedical engineering is regarded as some subdivison of bioengineering. Biomedical engineers use many aspects of biological engineering and manipulation of biological systems to create health related devices and molecules. Bioengineering is a wide field and many people who major in bioengineering will not be working in a medical related field. Especially bioengineers working in the animal-health or food industry. Bioengineers who might in the future use biological systems to find alternate sources of energy would also not be doing health related studies. These two articles represent two differant fields of study, that although are related, are not the same thing. The two articles should be cept seperate.--franci 09 (april 2, 2006)

I guess the problem is that I come from a US background where the terms are used interchangeably. In addition, labs that conduct research into optimization of biofuel resources use the same engineering techniques in order to develop antibiotics. It doesn't make sense to call one person a "biomedical engineer" and one a "bioengineer" when they may be working side-by-side on the lab bench. Nevertheless, I see your point. I just hope that someone looking into a degree programm in a "bioengineering" department will assume that it is substantially different than a program in "biomedical engineering". If you compare the bioengineering program at UCSD to the biomedical engineering program at Washington University you will see what I mean.ChrisTN 00:01, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

General Confusion

I don't think they should be merged. I actually think that there should be some type of warning that states that this is bioengineering which is not to be confused with biomedical engineering or biological engineering which are related fields but not the same thing. Also as a graduate of a bioengineering program I am generally confused as to how graduates of agricultural engineering could be a bioengineer. In my program we learn how to model biological systems in order to mimic these systems. It is more of a field that understands complex systems then a field that makes biological products or modifies food. We learned things areas like neural networks, genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming, and other biomemitic tools. I never studied anything that mechanical engineers or electrical engineers did. I was always told that they would deal with the simple linear systems, where the bioengineers would deal with the complex non-linear systems. If anyone has any feedback on this I would love to hear it. Thank You. --Lefevre18 04:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Mechanical engineers and electrical engineers do deal with nonlinear systems. Much research has been conducted on nonlinearities in heart rate and balance control that relates to device development which might be considered the mechanical engineering portion of BME/BE. Electrical engineering knowledge is used in order to understand how to exert external control over nonlinear systems or to use nonlinear systems to introduce beneficial noise, for example.ChrisTN


This is not a real clear piece. I recommend dividing the first par into two. The first par should give the definition then the second present the distinction between medical and agricultural applications. Also, the (proposed) second par is not very clear as stands. I had to read it twice silently and aloud a third time to make sense of it.

I suggest an edit for clarification. Is it okay for me to implement this? Pb1 Done! :-)

I would like to confirm the bioengineering does not have any "real" association with agricultural engineering and is essential the same thing as biomedical engineering. There may be some slight distinctions between bio- and biomed-, however, if you review the course requirements at any of the leading institutions, they are nearly identical, and in my program (UCSD) and many others the terms are used interchangeably. So not to flame MF135gas too bad..but your statement is not reflective of the Bioengineering discipline as a whole...oh and it is not "all intensive purposes".... its "all intents and purposes". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mjsandiego (talk • contribs) 00:33, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Synthetic Biology

I would like to note that bioengineering seems to include synthetic engineering (wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology ) and that this article should both mention/list synthetic biology and explain or create a separate page explaining what differentiates the two. The synthbio and the bioengineering pages should be linked somehow. I say this because I have trouble understanding the differences between the two. And obviously I would do this myself but I don't know squat about the topics. I'm a humanities kind of guy. Maybe I'll post this on the synthbio talk page too. Djdoobwah (talk) 09:10, 21 November 2007 (UTC)