Career Development in Bioengineering and Biotechnology
Eds: Madhavan, Oakley and Kun, Springer, pp485, £26.99 • ISBN 978-0-387-76494-8
Good news if you’re planning a career in the biosciences. Over the next decade the number of jobs in this field is expected to increase at twice the rate of any other science, engineering and technology (SET) sector. The bad news is that most post-graduates specialising in bioengineering and biotechnology concentrate exclusively on their domain knowledge at the expense of developing competency in professional skills – management, teamwork, communication – required to follow their subject as a career.
In other words we’re quite good at generating boffins, but not so good at integrating them into the non-research world of commercial engineering. This is an imbalance that ‘Career Development in Bioengineering and Biotechnology’ attempts to redress, and while the task is huge, the resulting manual is reassuringly cohesive. The editors – Madhavan, Oakley and Kun – have done a remarkable job in tying together material that varies from ‘Humanistic Science and Technology for a Hunger-Free World’ to ‘Environmental Consciousness and sustainable Engineering Design.’ Bioengineering and biotechnology are still new enough to have little in the way of agreed boundary markers. To their credit, the editors have allowed their book to be liberally comprehensive without ever sprawling.
Arranged in five sections, there are 71 chapters contributed by the world’s leading experts in the biosciences. Although the title of the book might lead you to suppose that its scope is simply that of a careers manual, as the editors say in their Preface, this weighty tome is “designed to provide balanced, practice-oriented viewpoints that acknowledge international differences in approach.” It is also a wealth of practical advice. The contributors know the psyche of the academic bioengineer. Mark W Kroll in the concluding remarks to his chapter on ‘Industry Research and Management’ makes the point that while a career in the medical device industry can be psychologically and financially rewarding, “most bioengineers don’t optimize their career path, and thus miss out on many of these rewards.” He goes on to say that developing this path can lead to good long-term quality-of-life benefits. You may be scientists in with your hands on the controls of the future of the world, he says, but you are allowed to enjoy conventional career success too. Hence, the inclusion of chapters on public relations, sales and marketing, social entrepreneurship and how to write your own non-fiction book.
The many articles in this book have been written in a wide range of styles, but all have one thing in common, and that is the ultimate goal of helping graduates make the transition from the study of bioengineering into the commercial world of non-research sectors. Each contributor seems to have an innate sense that if the 20th was the century of physics, then the 21st is the century of biology. It is not stretching the point to say that here is a cohesive sourcebook only too aware of its own sense of scientific destiny.
Reviewed by Nick Smith
Management Editor, and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society
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