Abstract
Biological engineering will play a significant role in solving many of the world's problems in medicine, agriculture, and the environment. Recently the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) released a document "Grand Challenges in Engineering," covering broad realms of human concern from sustainability, health, vulnerability and the joy of living. Biological engineers, having tools and techniques at the interface between living and non-living entities, will play a prominent role in forging a better future. The 2010 Institute of Biological Engineering (IBE) conference in Cambridge, MA, USA will address, in part, the roles of biological engineering in solving the challenges presented by the NAE. This letter presents a brief outline of how biological engineers are working to solve these large scale and integrated problems of our society.
Highlights
The U.S National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has recently published a document presenting "Grand Challenges for Engineering," available at [1]
CO2 can be captured from smokestacks and used along with municipal wastewater to grow algae that can be later processed into transportation fuels. Engineering challenges in this specific solution include, for example, increasing surface area for capturing CO2 from smokestacks, bioreactor design to maximize the biofuel yield from algae, synthetic biology to enhance algae's carbon sequestration potential and to generate high value products efficiently, ecological engineering to design interfaces between the system and externalities, and optimizing benefit-to-cost ratio for the entire process
Described above are seven areas of grand challenge that are being addressed by use of the methodologies of biological engineering
Summary
We describe a few of ways that biological engineering impacts these challenges. CO2 can be captured from smokestacks and used along with municipal wastewater to grow algae that can be later processed into transportation fuels Engineering challenges in this specific solution include, for example, increasing surface area for capturing CO2 from smokestacks, bioreactor design to maximize the biofuel yield from algae, synthetic biology to enhance algae's carbon sequestration potential and to generate high value products efficiently, ecological engineering to design interfaces between the system and externalities, and optimizing benefit-to-cost ratio for the entire process. Such an approach does not eliminate the release of CO2, but does permit a true recycling process. As with many life science endeavors, standardized tools, techniques, and units of measurement require further refinement so as to facilitate transformation of information across laboratories
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