Future goals of engineering in biology and medicine

In early September an international conference was held in Washington, D.C., to assess the rapidly changing and vigorous interaction between the engineering sciences and biology and medicine. Leaders from these fields discussed ways and means of broadening the scientific base for the biomedical field, expressed their dissatisfactions with present support mechanisms, explored the difficulties in bringing computers into the clinical and hospital situations, emphasized the need for training the right kind of people for biomedical endeavors, saw the emergence of the ``whole systems approach´´ as a healthy symptom, predicted greater multidisciplinary teamwork, greater use of computers, and a far deeper impact of biomedical engineering in the years ahead. One major hindrance to more rapid advances was said to be not science-centered but society-centered, rooted in our expression of social values. This article highlights this unusual and unusually productive conference.