His headless body pedalled for a while before falling to
In shock, all I was thinking was: "Wow! How can the body balance without the brain? The body's motion must have also been programmed in the spinal cord!"
It was spring of 1981 and I was 20 at the time, a second year university student with no background in biology or human physiology. A year earlier, I wanted to become a nuclear physicist and work on a Nobel Prize winning project. Then the war between Iran and Iraq started and the universities closed. I went to the Red Cross and to hospitals to learn first aid and then to the fronts to help with the war casualties.
The war scenes—and particularly the teenage cyclist on that particular day—made me decide to become a biomedical engineer.
Engineering knowledge, medical problems
Biomedical Engineering (BME) is now one of the fastest growing fields. Molecular Biology advances were the first modern revolution. Genomics was the second. Now the convergence of the life sciences and engineering as Biomedical Engineering is referred to as the third revolution.
But what is BME? And who can be called a biomedical engineer? The simplest and most informative definition is this: BME is the application of engineering knowledge and skills to challenging medical problems.
We can learn from examples. One of my heroes is the late Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a physician and researcher at Wisconsin University. When young Paul had just started his engineering studies, a friend of his father told him he could never become a physician. To prove that friend wrong, Paul quit engineering and went to study medicine. Thus, he became a medical doctor with an engineering mind.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-opinion-war-world-biomedical.html#jCp
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