The making of a new discipline

The transformation of agricultural engineering into biological engineering is a larger change than meets the eye. First of all, agricultural engineering is an applications discipline, and biological engineering is a science-based discipline. Thus, the emphasis of the education must change from its specific uses to a more general utilization of biological systems. Second, any discipline must have a core set of technical materials and methods. In agricultural engineering, these were largely supplied by the Ferguson Foundation series of textbooks that were used very widely. A new, agreement must be reached about how to supply these for biological engineering. Third, biological engineering is not likely to evolve only from agricultural engineering. chemical engineering, and to some extent biomedical engineering, also has designs on the discipline. Fourth, although the goal of biological engineering has been fairly clear since the early 1970's, the steps to reach the goal are not obvious to those who are trying to form the new discipline. The prospects for the new discipline of biological engineering (ire great, but much work remains to be done.