Professor Mark Saltzman:
This is a course,
a version of which I've taught
almost every year for the last
twenty years and it evolves a
little bit every year.
I think I get a little bit
better at it,
so hopefully you'll get some
advantage from that experience.
But the idea is to try to
present to you what's exciting
about Biomedical Engineering,
the ways that one can take
science and mathematics and
apply that to improve human
health.
I'm not working alone here,
but we have three teaching
fellows who are affiliated with
the course, two of which are
here today.
Yen Cu is back there,
Yen raise your hand higher so
everyone can see.
Yen worked on the course last
year and she's the senior of the
teaching fellows that are
working on the course this year.
Serge Kobsa is in the back and
he'll be the second teaching
fellow.
I should mention that Yen is a
PhD student in Biomedical
Engineering and Serge is an
M.D./PhD student who's getting
his PhD in Biomedical
Engineering.
The third teaching fellow
couldn't make it today,
his name is Michael Look and
I'll introduce him to you when
he's available.
This is the goal for my
first lecture today,
to try to answer these
questions.
You might have already noticed
that I'm using the classes V2
server so the syllabus is there,
I'm going to go over the
syllabus a little bit later,
but the syllabus is available
online.
The first reading is available
online and I'll talk more about
the readings when I get to that
portion of the lecture here.
I'm going to post PowerPoints
for all the lectures,
hopefully at least the day
before the lecture takes place,
so I posted this last night.
Some students find that they
benefit from printing out the
PowerPoints and they can just
take their notes along with the
slides as I go and that's one
way to do it,
but feel free to do it whatever
way works for you,
but those should be available.
The questions I want to try
to answer today are what is
Biomedical Engineering?
So why would you be interested
in spending a semester learning
about this subject?
I'll talk about who will
benefit from the course and a
little bit about sort of the
detailed subject matter that
we'll cover in the course of
this semester.
To answer the question what is
Biomedical Engineering,
we're going to spend time on
that today and we'll spend time
on Thursday,
and I want to approach it from
a couple of different angles.
One is by just showing you
a series of pictures which you
might recognize and talk about
why this is an example of
Biomedical Engineering.
This is one picture that
probably you all know what it is
when you see it,
it's a familiar looking image.
It's something that probably we
all have some personal
experience with,
right?
This is a chest x-ray that
would be taken in your doctor's
office, for example,
or a radiologist's office.
And it is a good example of
Biomedical Engineering and that
it takes a physical principle,
that is how do x-rays interact
with the tissues of your body,
and it uses that physics,
that physical principle to
develop a picture of what's
inside your body,
so to look inside and see
things that you couldn't see
without this device.
And you'll recognize some of
the parts of the image,
you can see the ribcage here,
the bones, you can see the
heart is this large bright
object down here.
If your - have good eyesight
from the distance that you're at
you can see the vessels leading
out of the heart and into the
lungs,
and the lungs are these darker
spaces within the ribcage.
Physicians over the years
of having this instrument have
learned how to be very
sophisticated about looking at
these pictures and diagnosing
when something is wrong inside
the chest,
for example.
So this is an example of
Biomedical Engineering,
one that is well integrated
into our society to the point
that we've probably all got a
picture like this somewhere in
our past,
and where we understand the
physical principles that allow
us to use it.
We've gotten,
over the last two decades in
particular, very sophisticated
about taking pictures inside the
body allowing doctors to look
inside the body and predict
things about our internal
physiology that they couldn't
predict just by looking at us or
putting their hands on us.
This image on the top here is
another example of an imaging
technique, this is a Positron
Emission Tomograph,
or PET image,
and it's taken by using
radionuclides and injecting them
into you,
so radioactive chemicals that
interact with tissues in your
body in a specific way and you
can where those radioactive
chemicals go.
It allows us to look not just
at the anatomy of what's going
on inside your body like an
x-ray does,
but to look at the chemistry,
the biochemistry of what's
happening inside a particular
organ or tissue in your body.
In this case,
these are pictures of the brain
and this has been an
exceptionally important
technique in understanding how
molecules like neurotransmitters
affect disease and how they
change in certain disease states
in people,
and we'll talk about this as
another example of Biomedical
Engineering, this advanced
method is for imaging inside the
body.
Well this third picture you
can't probably see too much
about but you probably recognize
what it is, right?
Where was this picture taken?
What kind of a space was it
taken in?
Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Mark Saltzman:
Somebody said OR or
operating room and that's right,
this is a picture in an
operating room,
and operating rooms if you went
into any operating room around
the country you would see lots
of examples of instruments that
are used to help surgeons,
anesthesiologists to keep the
patient alive and healthy during
the course of a surgery.
This particular one down
here, this portion here is a
heart/lung machine and this is a
machine that can take over the
function of a patient's heart
and lungs during the period when
they're undergoing open heart
surgery,
for example.
If they're having a coronary
artery bypass or they're having
a heart transplant,
then there's some period at
which their normal heart - their
heart is stopped and this
machine assumes the functions of
their heart.
And this is,
I think, an obvious example of
Biomedical Engineering,
building a machine that can
replace the function of one of
your organs even temporarily,
for example,
during an operation.
This is another familiar
picture, I purposely picked one
that looked sort of old
fashioned compared to the usual
way you see this,
which might be on the nightly
news.
You see a bleep going across
the screen to indicate that
they've got their finger on the
pulse of what's happening,
or you see it in TV shows like
ER.
You see these images on
computer screens all the time;
it's an example of an EKG or
ECG, an electrocardiograph.
It's a machine that also looks
inside your body,
but looks inside in a different
kind of way.
Rather than by forming an image
or a picture you put electrodes
on the surface of the body and
measure the electrical potential
as a function of position on the
body.
It turns out the electrical
potential or electricity that
you can measure on the surface
of the body reflects things that
are happening deeper inside like
the beating of your heart.
If you put the electrodes in
the right position and you
measure in the right way you can
detect the electrical activity
of the heart and record it on a
strip recorder like this one
shown here,
or display it on a computer.
So this is another example of
Biomedical Engineering where you
can look at the function of a
heart in a living person and a
physician who is experienced at
looking at these,
and a machine that works well,
with those two things you can
diagnose a lot of things that
are happening inside of a heart
and we'll talk about that about
halfway through the course.
This picture might be less
familiar to you but you probably
all know that we have developed
over the last 100 years or so
the ability to take cells out of
a person,
or cells out of an animal,
and keep those isolated cells
alive in culture for extended
periods of time:
this technology is called cell
culture technology.
We're going to spend quite of
bit of time talking about it
during the third week of the
course.
By taking cells from the skin,
for example,
or cells from your blood or
cells from the bone marrow and
keeping them alive in culture,
we've been able to study how
human cells work and learn a lot
about the functioning of human
organism.
We've also learned how to not
only keep cells alive,
but in certain cases make them
replicate outside the body,
so maybe you could take a few
skin cells and keep them in
culture in the right way and
replicate them so that you get
many millions of skin cells
after several weeks or so.
Now one of the new
technologies that's evolving,
that we're going to talk about
in the last half of the course,
is taking cells that have been
propagated in this way outside
the body and encouraging them to
form new tissues.
This is one example of that:
this is actually artificial
skin.
It's in this Petri dish.
Here is a thin membrane,
it's a polymer scaffold,
and on that polymer scaffold
scientists have placed some skin
cells and they've allowed it to
grow.
And if you maintained it in the
right way, this polymer scaffold
together with the skin cells
will grow into skin.
And you can use this tissue
engineered skin to treat a
patient who's had severe burns,
for example,
or a diabetic who's developed
ulcers that won't heal.
So this is an example of a
technology that's just emerging
now, it's certainly going to
impact you in your lifetime and
we'll talk about how it works
and what the current
state-of-the-art is there.
This device held here is
really made of mainly plastic
and a little bit of metal.
It's a fully implantable
artificial heart,
and it was introduced about
seven or eight years ago now.
It was implanted into the first
patient, a gentleman in
Kentucky, and he stayed alive
for a period of time with this
device replacing his heart.
Development of an artificial
heart, again another example of
Biomedical Engineering,
is something that people have
been trying to accomplish for
decades now, and this is the
closest that we've come and
there are many advantages of
this particular artificial
heart.
And it's important innovation
in several different ways and
we're going to talk about this
whole science of building
artificial organs,
devices that are made out of
totally synthetic components to
replace the function of your
natural organs,
and the artificial heart is a
good example of that.
This picture on the bottom
here is really just a series of
colored dots.
Some are yellow,
some are red,
and some are green - does
anybody know what this is?
Have you seen pictures like
this?
It's an example of a technology
called a gene chip that allows
you to, on each one of these
spots there is DNA for example,
that's specific for a
particular gene in your genome,
in the human genome for
example.
By incubating a small sample of
fluid from a patient on a gene
chip like this,
where every one of these dots
represents a different gene,
you can see by looking at the
pattern of colors on this chip
which genes are being expressed
and which genes are not being
expressed in that particular
individual.
So it lets you do a profile of
not just the genes that you
possess, for example,
but what genes are actually
being used to make proteins in
the cells that surround the
fluid where this was collected.
So this has been a remarkable
innovation.
It's another example of
Biomedical Engineering
technology that allows us to
look at what's happening inside
an individual,
a patient, in a totally
different way than we were
before.
By looking to see not just what
genes you carry but what genes
are being used at particular
times in your life.
This is mainly a research tool
now, but there's lots of reasons
to believe that this is going to
change the way that physicians
practice medicine by allowing
them to diagnose or predict
what's going to happen to you in
ways that they can't currently.
And so we'll talk about
technologies like this,
where they're at,
what the scientific basis of it
is, and how they might be
useful.
This is an airplane,
what does that have to do with
Biomedical Engineering?
Well you could stretch it and
say that an example of
engineering to improve human
health is getting them from one
place to another,
but that would be more of a
stretch than I'm going to make.
But it turns out that
technologies like airplanes,
which were developed in the
last century,
have become integral parts of
medicine.
For example,
you all know that the only
treatment for some diseases is
to get an organ transplant:
a kidney transplant,
or a liver transplant is the
only life extending intervention
that can be done for some kinds
of diseases.
Transplants require donors,
and the donor organ is usually
not at the same physical
location that the recipient is,
and so jets like this one have
become very important in
connecting donors to recipients.
A team of surgeons is working
to harvest an organ at one site
while another team of surgeons
is working to prepare the
recipient at another site,
and the organ is flown there.
Now why does that happen?
Because you have to get the
organ from one place to another
fast, right?
The organ has to get from one
place to another very rapidly
and this is the fastest way to
do it.
Well what if we could develop
ways using engineering
techniques to extend the life of
an organ, so it didn't have to
get it where it went so quickly?
Then that would open up lots of
more possibilities for organ
transplantation than are known
now.
What if we could figure out
ways to avoid organ
transplantation entirely?
What if we could just take a
few cells from that donor organ,
ship them to the site,
grow a new organ at the site
and then implant it there?
These are examples of
Biomedical Engineering of the
future that expand on what we
currently use,
which involves to no small
extent, technology like this.
I would guess that probably 30%
to 50% of you do this everyday,
you put a piece of plastic,
a synthetic piece of plastic
into your eye to improve your
vision.
Contact lens technology has
changed dramatically from the
time that I was born to the time
that you were born,
and the contact lenses you use
today are much different than
the ones that would have been
used 30 years ago.
This is Biomedical Engineering
as well.
Engineers who are developing
new materials,
materials that can be,
if you think about it,
there's not very many things
that you would want to put in
your eye and that you would feel
comfortable putting into your
eye,
so this is a very safe,
a very inert material.
What gives it those properties?
What makes it so safe that it
can be put in one of the most
sensitive places in your body,
in contact with your eye?
Why do you have confidence
putting it in contact with one
of the most important organs of
your body?
Because you trust biomedical
engineers to have done a good
job in designing these things
and we'll talk about how
biomaterials are designed and
tested,
and what makes a material,
the properties of a material
that you could use as a contact
lens,
what are the properties that it
needs to have.
This is an example of an
artificial hip.
We've learned a lot about the
mechanics of how humans work as
organisms over the last 100
years or so,
how we work as sort of physical
objects that have to obey the
laws of physics that you know
about.
We live in a gravitational
field and that it affects our
day to day life,
and if you have hip pain or a
hip that's diseased in some way,
and you can't stand up against
that gravitational field in the
same way, that severely limits
what you can do in the world.
So biomedical engineers have
been working for many years on
how to design replacement parts
for joints like the hip:
the artificial hip is the most
well developed of those.
We'll talk about this in some
detail.
You can imagine that there are
many requirements that a device
like this has to meet in order
for it to be a good artificial
hip and we'll talk about those
and how the design of these has
changed over the years and what
we can expect in the future.
Lastly, up here,
is a picture of a much smaller
device, this is actually an
artificial heart valve that is
made of plastics and metal and
can replace the valve inside
your heart.
Valvular disease is not
uncommon in the world;
we'll talk about that a little
bit.
We'll talk about how your
normal valves function inside
your heart and how your heart
couldn't work in the way that it
did if it didn't have valves
that were doing a very complex
operation many,
many times a day.
And then we'll talk about how
you can build something to
replace a complicated small part
in the body like that.
Well let's take a step back
for a minute;
that's one way of looking at
Biomedical Engineering,
by looking at sort of the
things that you know about that
have been the result of the work
of biomedical engineers and talk
more generally.
But what is engineering?
What do engineers do?
What makes engineering
different than other fields of
study?
What makes it unique so that we
have a school of engineering at
Yale that's separate from
science and the humanities?
Any thoughts?
Student:
It's more
hands-onProfessor Mark
Saltzman: It's much more
hands-on.
You're actually in there doing
things.
Many of the things I showed you
were things that were built from
parts, that's a good
description.
What makes it different from
science?
Science can be hands-on,
you might be down at the lake
picking up algae and studying
them or something,
that would be hands-on.
But what's different - what
would make you an engineer?
Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Mark Saltzman:
You design.
Scientists observe and try to
describe and engineers try to
design.
They take those descriptions
and the scientist that is known
and they try to design new
things,
and so if you look at a
dictionary it has words like
this, that you're designing
things or another way to say
that is that you're trying to
apply science,
you're looking at applications.
We're trying to take scientific
information and make something
new.
The other thing about it is
that you could make lots of
things that are new but
generally you think of engineers
as making things that are not
just new but they're useful,
that they do something that
needs to be done,
and that they do something that
improves life,
the quality of life of people.
So here is a brief and very
biased history of engineering.
It's short.
Engineering became a discipline
in about the middle of the
1800s.
Lots of universities started
teaching engineering as a
discipline including Yale.
In 1852, around that time,
this might have been the first
course that was offered in
engineering in the country:
it was taught at Yale in civil
engineering in 1852,
and even Yale students don't
know this;
what a long,
distinguished history of
engineering that their own
institution has.
In fact, the first PhD degree
in engineering was awarded to a
fellow named J.
Willard Gibbs at Yale in 1863
for a thesis he did on how gears
work or something,
I forget exactly what the
details are, but have you heard
of Gibbs?
Is it a name that rings a bell?
Where did you hear about Gibbs
from?
Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Mark Saltzman:
Sorry?Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Mark Saltzman:
G,
 Gibbs free energy,
that annoying concept that you
had to try to master in
chemistry at some point,
but Gibbs is really the father
of modern physical chemistry and
was one of the most famous
scientists of the nineteenth
century and got the first PhD in
engineering here at Yale.
Then from these beginnings,
engineers transformed life in
the twentieth century:
a lot of things started in the
twentieth century and became
common place.
Things like electricity,
having electricity delivered to
your home, so you had to have
ways to generate electricity and
to carry it from point to point
and it was engineers that did
that.
Built bridges and roads and
automobiles, so we can get from
one place to another relatively
quickly because of that.
Because there are airplanes
that were also developed by
engineers in that century.
We designed a lot of new
materials that could be used to
build things that couldn't have
been done otherwise.
Things like steel and polymers,
or plastics,
and ceramics,
and of course computers which
has progressed remarkably due to
the work of engineers in your
lifetime,
until now you can carry around
a cell phone,
which would have been
unthinkable even 30 years ago.
Engineers in the twentieth
century have transformed our
society.
One of the other things
that happened during the
twentieth century is that human
life expectancy increased
dramatically,
people started living a lot
longer.
What I plot on this graph here
is as a function time,
years, dates,
life expectancy as a function
of time.
What you'll see here is that
about - for the period before
sort of 1700 or so,
human life expectancy was less
than 40 years of age,
so that means a person that was
born in that year could expect
to live on average about 40
years: that was the expected
life span.
The expected life spans
increased dramatically in the
last couple of hundred years
until now,
for people that were born when
you were born you can expect to
live to be 80 years old,
a doubling in life span,
fairly dramatic.
So what's responsible for
that?
Why are people living longer
than they did just a few hundred
years ago?
Well there's a clue here on the
slide.
I indicated a couple of points
here where if we looked in the
1665 in London you could ask the
question - another way to ask
the question why are people
living so long is to ask the
question,
why do people die?
In 1665,93% of the people that
died in that year died of
infectious diseases.
In contrast,
if you look at a U.S.
city, ten years ago in 1997 for
example, then people still died
but they didn't die
predominantly from infectious
diseases.
They died from other things:
only 4% died from infectious
diseases.
So one of the reasons there
is a huge increase in life span
is because people aren't dying
of things that they would have
in prior years.
Why the change in infectious
diseases?
Why did I focus on that one?
What makes it so much better to
be alive now in terms of your
likelihood to die of an
infectious disease than it did
in London in 1665?
Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Mark Saltzman:
Yes, but what specifically?
Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Mark Saltzman:
Drugs like antibiotics,
Penicillin, Erythromycin,
again something else you
probably all had experience with
and you think well that's not
Biomedical Engineering that's
science,
that's somebody discovering a
molecule that kills
microorganisms.
That's true,
it is science,
but in order for that to go
from being a science that works
in a laboratory or in one
hospital to being Penicillin
which could be used all over the
world,
you've got to be able to make
it in tremendously large
quantities and that's the work
of biomedical engineers,
making Penicillin in the kinds
of quantities that you need so
that a dose could be available
for everyone in the world if
they got infected,
and to make it not just in
abundance but make it cheaply
enough that everyone could
afford it.
So if you can make 100 tons of
the drug but it costs $100,000 a
gram that might not be a useful
drug because nobody could afford
to use it.
So it's the work of biomedical
engineers, really,
to take these innovations in
science like drugs and make them
useful,
make them so that everybody can
take advantage of it.
You also mentioned vaccines
and we're going to talk a lot in
the middle part of the course
about vaccines and the
engineering of immunity.
How do you engineer what
happens in our immune system in
order to protect us from
diseases?
That's another example of an
area where biomedical engineers
have made tremendous
contributions.
So just to go a little bit
further with that point,
if you looked at the causes of
death in London in 1665 here's a
list that I got from a source
that was written at that time,
and I don't even understand
what some of these things are,
but the ones in green are
infectious diseases,
they're infectious causes of
disease.
Spotted fever in purples for
example, which we call measles,
was a significant cause of
death as was the plague,
which we don't have anymore,
thank goodness.
But people died typically of
either infectious diseases or
they died during childbirth,
or they might have died at old
age which would have been 50 or
so at that time.
In contrast today,
because we have antibiotics and
we have vaccines,
people don't die of infectious
diseases as often.
They live much longer lives and
they live to die of something
else and the leading causes of
death currently haven't changed
very much since 1997 when this
data was published:
they die of heart disease and
cancer primarily.
Those are the number one and
two causes of death.
We're going to talk a lot about
how one can use the technology
that we have now to treat these
kinds of diseases like cancer
and heart disease.
But why do you think these are
the number one and two now?
How come these have risen above
infectious diseases over the
last several hundred years?
Why is cancer one of the
leading killers in the U.S.
now but wasn't even on the
charts in 1665?
Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Mark Saltzman:
So it could be that -
what's your name?
Student:
JustinProfessor Mark
Saltzman: So Justin said it
could be new things that are
around and you're exposed to
stuff we weren't exposed to
before and that's true.
Our environment has changed,
the world has become
industrialized.
We're exposed to things that
might cause cancer where weren't
exposed to them before and so
that might be a reason.
Student:
they might not know what it
was?Professor Mark
Saltzman: In 1665,
they weren't diagnosing cancer.
It was easy to tell if somebody
had an infectious disease but
you might not have known that
they had cancer at that time and
they just died.
We didn't have the same methods
of diagnosis that we do now,
so maybe it was just not
diagnosed then.
Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Mark Saltzman:
People are living longer
and so now they have more
opportunity to get cancer,
right?
The longer you live the more
opportunity you have to acquire
a disease like cancer,
which often is an accumulation
of defects that occur over a
long period of time.
So we're going to talk about
cancer.
For example,
how cancer diagnosis has
improved, what are some of the
causes of cancer in the
environment around us and how
can we protect ourselves from
it,
and we'll talk about treatments
for it as well.
Cardiovascular disease,
why is cardiovascular disease
on the top?
Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Mark Saltzman:
Obesity or generally our
diets are different than they
were in 1665.
We eat different kinds of
things and many people think
that that's what has contributed
to much more heart disease.
But it could also be that it
wasn't as easily diagnosed then.
So people were dying of old age
and that was really heart
disease that was killing them
they just didn't know,
so it's multi-factorial and
we'll talk about that.
I just wanted to show you
this last graph,
or this last set of statistics
to go from causes of death in
the U.S.
to causes of death in the
world, to illustrate that what
happens in the world around us
in the U.S.
isn't necessarily the same as
what happens in other places
around the world.
In other places,
infectious disease is a much
bigger part of their life and a
much greater risk of death from
infectious diseases and
parasitic diseases if you live
in places other than the U.S.
or Western Europe, for example.
So the problem of infectious
disease prevention and treatment
isn't solved yet,
you know this,
right?
So there's plenty of room to
still innovate in that way,
to develop new methods that
could protect against diseases
like AIDS or diseases like
malaria that we don't have
problems with here but they do
in many parts of the world,
and so we'll talk about that.
I mentioned the book for
the course and the book is a
book that I've written.
It's not published yet and so
I'm going to put chapters from
the book that are in fairly
final form,
and I think you'll find them
easy to read,
but you don't have to buy it.
It's going to be posted on the
Internet and I'll post chapters
sort of in advance of the
reading assignments.
If you looked on the classes
server you saw Chapter 1,
and Chapter 1 describes some of
the sort or organization of
Biomedical Engineering into
sub-disciplines,
which I've listed here.
So we're going to talk
about thinking about the body as
a system, as a system that can
be understood the same way a
motor could be understood or a
computer that could be
understood.
That study is Systems
Physiology and that's an
important subdivision of
Biomedical Engineering.
We'll talk about
instrumentation a little bit and
I've mentioned this,
things like the EKG machine and
the heart/lung machine are
instruments that are designed to
either keep patients alive or to
allow you to monitor their
function over time.
We'll talk about imaging which
I mentioned, biomechanics or the
study of humans as mechanical
objects.
We'll talk about a field which
is growing now called
biomolecular engineering and
that is the design of
biomaterials or new materials
that can be implanted in the
body,
it's new ways of drug delivery.
It's this whole field of tissue
engineering that I mentioned
earlier.
We'll talk about artificial
organs and we'll talk about
systems biology or thinking
about how to acquire information
for things like gene chips and
use that information to
understand what's happening in a
complex organism like you.
Now, I've highlighted three
of these in blue here,
imaging, mechanics,
and biomolecular engineering
because if you go on to study
Biomedical Engineering here at
Yale anyway,
these are the things that you
might pick to emphasize on.
These are the things that we do
best and where we have advanced
course work available in these
three categories and so I'm
going to emphasize these three
but we'll talk about all of
these subjects as we go through
the course.
The syllabus is posted online.
I've just copied it here so you
could take a look at it.
Week 1 we're trying to talk
about this question,
what is Biomedical Engineering.
There are some chapters here
for readings:
Chapters 1,2,
and 4.
I've only posted Chapter 1,
which basically reviews the
things I've talked about today.
Chapters 2 and 4 are really
reviews of things that you
probably already know something
about, so they're reviews of
basic chemistry.
So chemical concepts that are
important for us to all
understand as we move forward
and review of proteins and
biochemistry,
basically.
So I'm going to post those
online and we're not going to
talk about them directly in the
lectures but they're there as a
resource,
so if you read about something
like pH and you've forgotten
what pH is, you can go back to
Chapter 2 which is posted and
you can read about pH and I try
to take you through sort of what
you need to know in order to
understand the rest of the
course material.
And if you've forgotten about
proteins and what their
structure is like,
you can go to Chapter 4 and
read sort of a brief review of
protein biochemistry.
In the section this week,
I'll talk about the section
meetings in just a moment,
but there's no required section
meeting this week.
During the section times I'll
be available if you feel like
you want to read Chapters 2 and
4 and then come and ask
questions,
sort of a tutorial on these
topics of chemistry and
biochemistry,
then I'll be available to talk
about that during that time.
We'll start with Week 2 talking
about Genetic Engineering;
what's DNA, how can it be
manipulated, how is our ability
to manipulate DNA led to things
like gene therapy which can now
be in people.
And we'll talk about that and
that's what Chapter 3 is about.
We'll talk about cell culture
engineering during Week 4,
how do you maintain cells in
culture, what are the limits of
this.
How can you use cultured cells
to do things,
and how do engineers build new
things out of cultured cells is
going to be a subject we talk
about throughout the rest of the
course and the chapter is listed
here.
So I think that's enough,
you can follow along with the
syllabus and see sort of what
the topics are each week,
what the reading assignment is
to do before the lecture in
order to get the most out of the
lecture.
Now, each week we have a
section meeting,
required section,
they're all - all the sections
meet on Thursday afternoon and
the idea of the section is to
amplify on some subject we've
talked about during the week.
We do this in the undergraduate
Biomedical Engineering
laboratory in the Malone
Building so that we can do
demonstrations and sort of hands
on projects to really get a
little bit deeper into the
subject that we're considering.
So in the first week we run a
section called from strawberries
to gene therapy where we talk
about DNA,
extract DNA,
you can play with the DNA of an
organism and we can think about
how to use DNA for other
purposes.
In Week 3 you'll actually
do some cell culture in the
laboratory and look at cultured
cells and learn how to
manipulate,
do some manipulations on cells
and culture, and so on
throughout the weeks.
We have a one hour section
that's designed to give you some
more detailed experience,
some hands on experience with
some of the topics we're talking
about.
There are no lab reports that
are due.
There sometimes will be
homework assignments which sort
of build on what we've done
during the section but it's not
a lab in that sense that it's a
long experience in the afternoon
or that requires any detailed
reports.
But it is required and I think
an important part of the course.
There's a mid-term exam halfway
through and a final exam at the
end, and there's a term paper
which is due near the end of the
course.
So this just - just saying
a little bit more about the
sections, there's three
sections,
we have online discussion
section sign up,
has anybody tried to do that
yet?
Just so they know that it's
available?
So it was supposed to be
available from day one,
you can sign up for a section
that fits your schedule and this
is sort of the list of things
that we'll go through in the
section meetings.
Grading - 30% of the grade
is for the mid-term,
30% for the final,
and the final is not
cumulative,
the final covers only things
for the last half of the course,
so it's really just like a -
covers half the course but it's
given during the final exam
period.
There's a term paper which I'll
talk more about as the weeks go
on that's also worth 30% of the
grade.
You'll have weekly -
approximately weekly homework
assignments that account for 10%
of your grade,
but they have an impact beyond
the 10% because if you can do
the homework and you understand
the homework,
you're going to have no problem
with the exams.
I encourage you to spend more
time than the weighting would
suggest.
So how do you get an "A" in
the course?
It's very simple.
You do the reading before
class, you come to class,
and you do the homework.
And I guarantee you if you do
those three things throughout
the course that you'll do well
in the course and I've said this
almost every time I've given the
course and nobody has ever told
me that I'm wrong.
And so do these three things,
if you don't get an "A" than
you can come back and talk to me
about it later.
The assignment for the next
class is to do Problem 2 of
Chapter 1, which I've repeated
right here,
and that's to think beyond what
I've talked about in terms of
what is Biomedical Engineering.
To think a little bit more
about Biomedical Engineering
products that you've encountered
in your life,
or that you have some
experience with,
and then to think beyond what
information I've given you in
the chapter or in this lecture
to say what products of
biomedical engineering do you
expect to become routine in the
next 50 years.
So spend ten or 15 minutes
thinking about this and write it
down and bring your responses to
class in the next period and
we'll talk about that.
So at the end of this first
lecture where I've gone some way
in trying to tell you what
Biomedical Engineering is about,
I thought I would try to relate
it in a different sort of way.
And you've heard this poem,
London Bridge is Falling Down,
everybody's heard this poem?
You played the game;
I don't know if there's a
videogame now,
if people play games like this
where London Bridge is Falling
Down.
This is a picture of London
Bridge, it's an interesting
bridge which is important in the
history of London.
Bridges have really changed our
society and allowed us to get
from one place to another in
ways that we couldn't have
gotten to easily before.
One of the interesting things
about London Bridge is that it's
now no longer in London,
it's in Arizona,
you can see a palm tree here.
When they reconstructed London
Bridge they moved the old London
Bridge to Arizona;
some guy bought it.
That must be an interesting
story, but I just have it here,
and I think the poem tells you
something about engineering if
you go through it - and the
problems of engineering.In
bridge building we're well
advanced in understanding what
are the problems with building
bridges and how do we overcome
them?
For example,
one thing that could happen is
that you build it up with wood
and clay,
you pick the wrong material for
a bridge, and it will not stand
up to the forces of nature.
It will wash away and so you
got to pick the right materials
in order to build a bridge.
So you pick a better material
like iron and steel,
that makes a better bridge,
we know that now because we
have experience with bridges,
but still your bridge might
fail.
It might fail for a different
reason.
It might bend and bow,
that is it's not the forces of
nature like the movement of the
river that's knocking the bridge
down,
but it's just the failure of
these materials over time,
that they don't last as long as
they might.
So you build it with a material
like silver and gold,
and then you encounter the
problems of society that your
bridge might get stolen because
somebody thinks they have a
better use for silver and gold
than your bridge.
I would say that in
Biomedical Engineering,
largely, we're still at the
stage where we're trying to
understand how things work and
how they fail,
and what materials are the
right ones.
We're maybe where civil
engineering and bridge building
was 100 years ago.
And that makes it for me a very
exciting time to study this
because the problems aren't
solved in the way that bridge
building is largely a solved
problem now.
Problems like the artificial
heart are still unsolved,
there's still room for
innovation,
still room to learn from what
hasn't worked before,
to learn from science,
and to design something better.
So one of my purposes of this
course is to get you,
whether you study Biomedical
Engineering after this or not,
excited about the subject so
that you start thinking about
how you could innovate in this
area where lots of problems are
still left to solve,
so I'll see you on Thursday
hopefully.
 
