History of Biomedical Engineering
In its broadest sense, biomedical engineering has been with us for centuries, perhaps even thousands of years.
In 2000, German archeologists uncovered a 3,000-year-old mummy from Thebes with a wooden prosthetic
tied to its foot to serve as a big toe. Researchers said the wear on the bottom surface suggests that it could be
the oldest known limb prosthesis. Egyptians also used hollow reeds to look and listen to the internal goings on
of the human anatomy. In 1816, modesty prevented French physician Rene Laennec from placing his ear next
to a young woman’s bare chest, so he rolled up a newspaper and listened through it, triggering the idea for his
invention that led to today’s ubiquitous stethoscope.
No matter what the date, biomedical engineering has provided advances in medical technology to improve
human health. Biomedical engineering achievements range from early devices, such as crutches, platform
shoes, wooden teeth, and the ever-changing cache of instruments in a doctor’s black bag, to more modern
marvels, including pacemakers, the heart-lung machine, dialysis machines, diagnostic equipment, imaging
technologies of every kind, and artificial organs, implants and advanced prosthetics. The National Academy
of Engineering estimates that there are currently about 32,000 bioengineers working in various areas of health
technology.
As an academic endeavor, the roots of biomedical engineering reach back to early developments in
electrophysiology, which originated about 200 years ago. An early landmark in electrophysiology occurred in
1848 when DuBois Reymond published the widely recognized Ueber die tierische Elektrizitaet. Raymond’s
contemporary, Hermann von Helmholtz, is credited with applying engineering principles to a problem in
physiology and identifying the resistance of muscle and nervous tissues to direct current.
In 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered that a cathode-ray tube could make a sheet of paper
coated with barium platinocyanide glow, even when the tube and the paper were in separate rooms. Roentgen
decided the tube must be emitting some kind of penetrating rays, which he called “X” rays for unknown. This
set off a flurry of research into the tissue-penetrating and tissue-destroying properties of X-rays, a line of
research that ultimately produced the modern array of medical imaging technologies and virtually eliminated
the need for exploratory surgery.
Biomedical engineering’s unique mix of engineering, medicine and science emerged alongside biophysics and
medical physics early this century. At the outset, the three were virtually indistinguishable and none had
formal training programs.
Between World War I and World War II a number of laboratories undertook research in biophysics and
biomedical engineering. Only one offered formal training: the Oswalt Institute for Physics in Medicine,
established in 1921 in Frankfurt, Germany, forerunner of the Max Planck Institute fur Biophysik.
The Institute’s founder, Friedrich Dessauer, pioneered research into the biological effects of ionizing
radiation. The Oswalt Institute and the University in Frankfurt soon established formal ties that led to a Ph.D.
program in biophysics by 1940. Research topics included the effects of X-rays on tissues and the electrical
properties of tissues. The staff of 20 included university lecturers, research fellows, assistants and technicians.
Following the Second World War, administrative committees began forming around the combined areas of
engineering, medicine and biology. A biophysical society was formed in Germany in 1943. Five years later,
the first conference of engineering in medicine and biology convened in the United States, under the auspices
of the Institute of Radio Engineers (forerunner of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the
American Institute for Electrical Engineering, and the Instrument Society of America. It was a small meeting.
About 20 papers were delivered to an audience of fewer than 100. The first 10 annual conferences paid most
of their attention to ionizing radiation and its implications. As conference topics broadened, so did attendance.
The topic of the 1958 conference, Computers in Medicine and Biology, drew 70 papers and more than 300
attendees. By 1961, conference attendance swelled to nearly 3,000.
The 1951 IRE convention generated enough interest in medical electronics that the IRE formed a Professional
Group on Medical Electronics. An early action of this group was to collaborate on the Annual Conference on
Electronic Instrumentation and Nucleonics in Medicine, which the AIEE began about 1948. In 1954, the
AIEE, the IRE and the ISA formed the Joint Executive Committee on Medicine and Biology, which began
organizing the annual conferences.
In 1963, the AIEE and the IRE merged to form the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.
Contributing forces for the merger were the members of the AIEE and IRE technical committees for
biomedical engineering. Most members favored it and had been collaborating with their counterparts in the
other society for years.
At the merger it was decided to carry over to the IEEE the IRE system of Professional Groups. The IRE
Professional Group on Medical Electronics became the IEEE Professional Group on Bio-Medical Engineering
(PGBME), the name change reflecting the fact that many members, particularly former AIEE members, were
concerned with non-electronic topics.
Also in the early 1960s the NIH took three significant steps to support biomedical engineering. First, it
created a program-project committee under the General Medical Sciences Institute to evaluate programproject applications, many of which served biophysics and biomedical engineering. Then it set up a
biomedical engineering training study section to evaluate training-grant applications, and it established two
biophysics study sections. A special “floating” study section processed applications in bioacoustics and
biomedical engineering. Many applications did not make it to the biomedical engineering study section and
ended up in radiology, physiology or other panels.
The diversity of work in biomedical engineering and the diversity of background of the people contributing to
this field made it difficult for a single organization to represent everyone. In the 1960s there were efforts by
some leaders of the PGBME, which became the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, to
achieve greater autonomy within the IEEE in order to accommodate a more diverse membership. Because
there were quite a few professional groups, several umbrella organizations were established to facilitate
cooperation. In the late 1960s the Alliance for Engineering in Medicine and Biology was formed. In 1968, the
Biomedical Engineering Society was formed to give “equal status to representatives of both biomedical and
engineering interests and promote the increase of biomedical engineering knowledge and its utilization.”
Initially, the membership of the society consisted of 171 founding members and 89 charter members.
Membership now numbers nearly 1,200 professional biomedical engineers, with another 1,600 student
members.
The society awarded the Alza Distinguished Lectureship from 1971 to 1993 to encourage the theory and
practice of biomedical engineering. The BMES Distinguished Lectureship Award was founded in 1991 to
recognize outstanding achievements in biomedical engineering. Other honors include a young investigator
award, the BMES Distinguished Service Award, and the Presidential Award, established in 1999 to enable
BMES presidents to recognize extraordinary leadership within the society.
In addition to the professional societies, the field of biomedical engineering received a large ally when The
Whitaker Foundation was created in 1975, upon the death of U.A. Whitaker. As an engineer and
philanthropist, Whitaker recognized that major contributions to improving human health would come from
the merging of medicine and engineering. Since its inception, the foundation has primarily supported
interdisciplinary medical research and education, with the principal focus being on biomedical engineering.
The foundation has become the nation’s largest private benefactor of biomedical engineering. By 2002, it had
contributed more than $615 million to universities and medical schools to support faculty research, graduate
students, program development, and construction of facilities.
In 1990 the National Science Foundation and The Whitaker Foundation observed that in spite of the
numerous academic programs calling themselves “bioengineering” or “biomedical engineering,” there was no
structure for this widely diversified field. Because many advances in biomedical engineering were generated
through the collaboration of engineers and clinical scientists in a number of different fields, the evolution of
biomedical engineering as a profession in the 1970s and 1980s was characterized by the emergence of
separate professional societies with a focus on applications within their own field.
As a step toward unification, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering was created in
1992. AIMBE was born from the realization that an umbrella organization was needed to address the issues of
public policy and public and professional education that comprise these engineering sciences. Ten societies
saw the virtue of this approach and formed the original members of AIMBE. Today, its 17 society members
work to “establish a clear and comprehensive identity for the field of medical and biological engineering, and
improve intersociety relations and cooperation within the field of medical and biological engineering.”
The earliest academic programs began to take shape in the 1950s. Their establishment was aided by Sam
Talbot of Johns Hopkins University, who petitioned the National Institutes of Health for funding to support a
group discussion of approaches to teaching biomedical engineering. Ultimately three universities were
represented in these discussions: The Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania and the
University of Rochester. These three institutions, along with Drexel University, were among the first to win
important training grants for biomedical engineering from the National Institutes of Health.
In 1973, discussions started about broadening the base of Pennsylvania’s graduate Department of Biomedical
Electronic Engineering by including other activities and adopting and undergraduate curriculum. Its present
graduate program is an extension of the earlier one.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, development at other institutions followed similar paths, but occurred
more rapidly in most cases due to the growing opportunities of the field and in response to the important NIH
initiative to support the development of the field. The earlier institutions were soon followed by a second
generation of biomedical engineering programs and departments. These included: Boston University in 1966;
Case Western Reserve University in 1968; Northwestern University in 1969; Carnegie Mellon, Duke
University, Renssselaer and a joint program between Harvard and MIT in 1970; Ohio State University and
University of Texas, Austin, in 1971; Louisiana Tech, Texas A&M and the Milwaukee School of Engineering
in 1972; and the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1973.
The number of departments and programs continued to rise slowly but steadily in the 1980s and early 1990s.
In 1992, The Whitaker Foundation initiated large grant programs designed to help institutions establish or
develop biomedical engineering departments or programs. Since then, the numbers of departments and
programs have risen to more than 90. Some of the largest and most prominent engineering institutions in the
country, such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, have established programs and emerged as leaders in
the field. Many other new and existing programs have benefited from the foundation’s support.
A major development took place in late 2000 when President Clinton signed a bill creating the National
Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the NIH. According to NIBIB’s website, its mission is
to "improve health by promoting fundamental discoveries, design and development, and translation and
assessment of technological capabilities. The Institute coordinates with biomedical imaging and
bioengineering programs of other agencies and NIH institutes to support imaging and engineering research
with potential medical applications and facilitates the transfer of such technologies to medical applications."
The newest of the NIH institutes, NIBIB spent much of 2001 building program and administrative staff,
preparing a budget request, setting up office space, determining funding and grant identification codes and
procedures, and identifying program (research, training, and communication) focus areas and opportunities.
NIBIB assumed administration of the NIH's Bioengineering Consortium (BECON) in September 2001, and
awarded its first research grant in April 2002.