Overview
Overview
Make science fiction into science reality.
Description
It sounds like a joke, but biomedical engineering is the closest thing anyone will ever get to being Dr. Moreau, Dr. Zed, Dr. Frankenstein, or the guy in Jurassic Park is that created all the dinosaurs. Phil? We want to say Phil something.
In the days of yore, which were directly after olden times, medicine was a whole lot of looking at sick people, shrugging, and saying, "I don't know. Witches or something." Not content with diagnosing every problem as witches, some people decided to up their game.
The result? Technology. That's really science's solution to everything; although, in science's defense, it's worked pretty well thus far.
Nowadays, doctors hardly ever diagnose the flu as "probably witches." A big part of that is all those machines they use to poke, scan, prod, insert, film, boogie... okay, not that last one. The devices they're using to treat and diagnose are the results of biomedical engineering.
It's called an interdisciplinary field, which is just a fancy way of saying that it combines two other things—in this case, medicine and engineering. Biomedical Engineers get to learn tons of stuff and transform themselves into mad scientists in the process.
Well, the "mad" part is sort of optional, but you're totally allowed to cackle.
Lots of the projects Biomedical Engineers have sound like the stuff of science fiction. They include genetic engineering, which resulted in Velociraptors; tissue engineering, which is basically 3D printing of organs for transplant; pharmaceutical engineering, which just sounds fun; and tons of others.
Even better, biomedical engineering is on the verge of a bunch of breakthroughs—not necessarily ones that would allow a prospective major to, say, rule the world from a throne of science, but not not those, either. What we're saying is there's potential.
Famous People who majored in Biomedical Engineering
- Yuan Cheng Fung
- Bonnie Dunbar
- Stanley M. Dunn
- James J. Collins
- Vinod Khosla
- Dr. Victor Frankenstein
- Tony Stark (with Mechanical Engineering)
Percentage of US students who major in Biomedical Engineering:
0.123%
Stats obtained from this source.