A. Michaels


tech, Cetus, Biogen). These organizations are establishing highly compe-
tent and innovative interdisciplinary bioprocess R&D teams, comprising
engineering-oriented life scientists and life science-oriented engineers,
well-equipped to serve their near-term needs.
 Regrettably, however, this important new bioprocess R&D resource is
being nurtured and developed within a quite small and secretive segment
of the rapidly expanding biotechnology industry, and can hardly be ex-
pected to supply the talent and know-how required to meet the process
R&D needs of the succeeding generations of biotechnology-based busi-
nesses, that is, those directed to biologically-derived nutritional and agri-
cultural products, industrial chemicals, and fuels.
 Moreover, our universities are today unable to educate and supply to the
industrial sector even traditionally-trained biochemical engineers in num-
bers adequate to satisfy the anticipated requirements of the biotechnology
industry. Of even greater concern is the fact that few if any of our most
prestigious universities are yet able to persuade their life science and engi-
neering faculties to cooperate in the creation of imaginative teaching and
research programs aimed at producing the unique species of life science-
oriented engineer (or engineering-oriented life scientist) which is so desper-
ately needed by the modern biotechnology industry.
 Thus, we are faced with a crisis of shortage of properly trained and
qualified life science and engineering personnel equipped to transform our
newly-found powers of genetic manipulation into industrially useful and
profitable products and processes. Without an early solution to this prob-
lem, the momentum which has characterized the biotechnology revolution
of the past decade is likely to be lost, and with it, many of the hopes of
societal benefit from its discoveries.


KEEPING THE BIOTECHNOLOGY SHIP ON COURSE:
 THE ENGINEERING CHALLENGE OF THE
 COMING DECADE

 The successful commercialization of the first-generation bioproducts
based on modern genetic engineering has been, as noted earlier, attribut-
able to fruitful collaboration between life scientists and chemical and bio-
chemical engineers, who have welded established biological laboratory
practices with available chemical/biochemical process technology to yield
acceptable manufacturing processes for these relatively low-volume, high-
unit-value products. Now receiving increasing attention, however, is an
expanding family of human/animal health-care products (exemplified by