Have you Invented Anything Lately? [From the Editor]

Several years ago, I had to be seen as a patient by a specialist physician. In taking my medical history, he went through the usual list of questions, and then he asked me what kind of work I did. I told him I was a biomedical engineer, and he responded, “Have you invented anything lately?” Initially, I was amazed at this practitioner’s clairvoyance in discovering that my work involved the development of new medical instrumentation, but then I thought maybe he was not as perceptive as I originally thought. Maybe he just had a very narrow view of what biomedical engineers did and thought that all biomedical engineering involved was the invention of new gizmos for use in clinical medicine. Perhaps he assumed we were just gadgeteers who occasionally came up with something useful to the field of medicine but that more often our creative endeavors resulted in frivolous devices.