NIH Plans Bioengineering Initiative

Bruce Agnew In response to high-profile calls for the establishment of a new center for bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health--or even a separate institute--and to complaints from bioengineers that most peer-review study sections don9t understand their field, NIH officials held a symposium in February to identify engineering ideas worth supporting. Although NIH9s plans are still preliminary, top NIH brass say the goal is to bring together engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and biologists to work on biological problems that are becoming increasingly multidisciplinary in nature.