A specter is haunting the scientific research world—the specter of funding limits. Whether you are an established PI or an undergraduate about to embark on training in our field, a cancer biologist or a DNA origami artist, you have probably worried (or at least sensed other people worrying) about how the projected funding climate will affect our future. Especially following the strong increases in the NIH, NSF, DoE, and DoD budgets through most of the past decade, the current plateau is frustrating hopes for ongoing expansion of efforts in academic research.
The timing of this constraint is especially problematic for emerging new areas that offer exceptional promise beyond well-established fields, such as our own Biological Engineering. Our faculty has enlarged from 13 to 28 full-time equivalents—and from 22 to more than 40 members overall—in the nine years since our final establishment in 2004 as a full-fledged MIT department; and our graduate student population has essentially doubled from 10-12 admitted per class to 20-25 in recent years. Can we sustain this upscaled effort, and even continue to extend it further as we believe the needs of society in addressing important technological problems requires?
The answer from here, at least, is YES. Why should we be confident about this? Let’s call it “historical imperative.”
Our Department and our field more broadly are young and growing for reasons that relate almost deterministically to the progress of science; this fact is not dependent on the vicissitudes of the federal budget. Areas we represent, including computational and systems biology, synthetic biology, tissue engineering, biomaterials and chemical biology, bioimaging and measurement, are each driven by technological developments or frontiers in current knowledge that at this time call for the expertise and participation of scientists at the biology/engineering interface. With the essential discoveries of molecular and cellular biology that now lie behind us, the synthesis of biology, physical science, and engineering is increasingly required to further our understanding of life and our ability to improve human health.
This is a high level argument, but it has a practical side that is substantiated by data. Even statistics from the current cost-cutting environment offer modest encouragement for bioengineers. A closer look at the NIH budget, for instance, shows that although the overall budget cuts are fairly equal across multiple NIH Institutes, the impact on researchers funded through the different units differs. Two of the NIH Institutes most likely to fund bioengineering research expect lower than average cuts to grant expenditures, compared with the rest of NIH. The National Institute for General Medical Sciences and the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering project grant funding declines of 5.1% and 4.3%, respectively, whereas the National Cancer Institute and many of the disease-focused units expect drops by over 6%.
Unconvinced? Evidence of the trend towards bioengineering funding is found at a programmatic level as well. One of the notable achievements of Subra Suresh, who left MIT to lead the NSF in 2010, was the creation of the so-called “INSPIRE” program, which explicitly funds research at the intersection of traditional disciplines. This parallels the so-called Common Fund programs at the NIH, such as the Transformative R01 and Pioneer Awards, which likewise encourage just the sort of interdisciplinary research that biological engineering exemplifies. Other funding movements also reflect this trend. Among various programs in the public and private spheres, an outstanding instance is the President’s new “BRAIN” initiative, which aims to fund research into technologies for understanding brain function, a distinctly bioengineering-flavored agenda.
The opportunities for employing biological or biomedical engineers themselves are also expanding. At universities, new bioengineering departments and undergraduate programs have been springing up, notwithstanding the economic downturn of the ‘naughties’; Stanford (2003), Yale (2003), MIT (2005), Caltech (2009), and Harvard (2010) are examples. Campuses are also ceding territory in more traditional departments to bioengineers. Chemistry and chemical engineering departments are particularly energetic along this avenue, with their faculty positions now frequently given to chemical biologists, metabolic engineers, bioinstrumentation specialists and others who could just as well fly the flag of biological engineering. The collective increases in space, personnel, and resources that accompany these developments put momentum behind our field that can’t easily be reversed. In fact, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that employment of biomedical engineers “is expected to grow by 62% from 2010 to 2020, much faster than the average for all occupations.” CNN Money also recently rated biomedical engineering its “best job in America”; if that’s not validation, what is?
A troublesome funding climate and seemingly overcrowded job market are doubtless challenges to anyone seeking success in scientific research—persistence, creativity, and hard work are always required. But amidst the obstacles, all biological engineers should keep in mind that the exigencies of this moment call specifically for the forms of progress we are trying to bring about as a community. Biological engineering will realize its historical imperative despite the varying winds of political dialectic that buffet science policy to and fro. From our Department at MIT, we emerge with incomparable training, credentials, and social and material capital on our side … and we have a world to win!