(238a) Teaching Better Biomedical Engineering: Sixty Years of Chemical Engineering Contributions That Shaped up Bioengineering

The Principles of Chemical Engineering became extremely important in the young field of biomedical engineering 65 years ago. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of wild scientific expansion on the chemical engineering principles to the world of biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences in a way that nobody could have expected or predicted. Through the pioneering contributions of the late Ed Merrill of MIT, Mitchel Litt of U Penn, Alan Michaels of MIT and Stanford, Ken Bischoff, then of the Universities of Texas and Maryland, Bob Dedrick of NIH, Kumar Chandrasekaran of ALZA Corporation, Clark Colton of MIT, John Quinn and John Anderson of Illinois, Don Paul of the University of Texas, Robert Langer of MIT, Ken Himmelstein of the University of Kansas, Michael Sefton of the University of Toronto, Ping Lee of Ciba-Geigy and now University of Toronto, and the writer, all chemical engineers, the principles were set for the quantitative development and rational design of the new generation of biomedical devices, advances artificial organs, simple and complex medical units, tissue engineered products and drug delivery devices that are common now. Chemical engineering provided the solid background that led to this design and optimization and became the early work of what Adam Heller and others call now a "system-reponsive medical device". A key problem of biology and medicine this century has been to reduce the problems of disease to problems of molecular science and fundamental engineering problems. Many of the associated methodological advances in biomedical sciences are the result of earlier investments in the basic sciences. Thus, breakthroughs in molecular science and ChE principles have opened a floodgate of new opportunities for curing disease. In this work (i) we summarize the impact of chemical engineering in BME; (ii) we analyze major societal changes and how they impacted the development of BME; (iii) we point out the significant impact of ChE principles in solving advances medical problems and formulated 21st century bioengineering; and (iv) we point out the early leadership of chemical/biomedical engineers in the shaping of diversity, equity and inclusivity in the field.