Current Issues in Biomedical Engineering Education

DURING the past decade biomedical engineering has matured as a profession, and its diversity has been increasingly recognized. At the same time the environment external to biomedical engineering has changed rapidly. It has changed politically, socially, and economically. It is the thesis of this essay that biomedical engineering must recognize these external changes and define our goals and objectives in a fashion consonant with and responsive to these changes. To be unresponsive to environmental changes is to invite the fate of the dinosaur¿only our fossilized remains will mark our existence. It makes little difference whether the unresponsiveness is through ignorance, inertia, or obstinacy; the ultimate result will be the same.