Biomedical Engineering Defined Pt 10

Why the change in infectious diseases? Why did I focus on that one?

What makes it so much better to be alive now in terms of your likelihood to die of an infectious disease than it did in London in 1665? Yes, but what specifically? Drugs like antibiotics, penicillin, erythromycin, again something else you probably all had experience with and you think well that’s not Biomedical Engineering, that’s science, that’s somebody discovering a molecule that kills microorganisms.

That’s true, it is science, but in order for that to go from being a science that works in a laboratory or in one hospital to being penicillin, which could be used all over the world, you’ve got to be able to make it in tremendously large quantities and that’s the work of biomedical engineers, making penicillin in the kinds of quantities that you need so that a dose could be available for everyone in the world if they got infected and to make it not just in abundance but make it cheaply enough that everyone could afford it. So, if you can make 100 tons of the drugs, but it costs $100,000 a gram that might not be a useful drug because nobody could afford to use it.

So, it’s the work of biomedical engineers, really, to take these innovations in science like drugs and make them useful, make them so that everybody can take advantage of it. And you also mentioned vaccines and we’re going to talk a lot in the middle part of the course about vaccines and the engineering of immunity. How do you engineer, what happens in our immune system in order to protect us from diseases? That’s another of an area where biomedical engineers have made tremendous contributions.

So, just to go a little bit further with that point, if you looked at the causes of death of London in 1665, here’s a list that I got from a source that was written at that time, and I don’t even understand what some of these things are, but the ones in green are infectious diseases, they’re infectious causes of disease.

Spotted fever in purples for example, which we call measles, was a significant cause of death as was the plague, which we don’t have any more, thank goodness. But, people died typically of either infectious diseases or they died during childbirth or they might have died at old age which would have been 50 or so at that time.

Biomedical Engineering Defined  Pt 10

Biomedical Engineering Defined Pt 9

Things like electricity, having electricity delivered to your home, so you had to have ways to generate electricity and to carry it from point to point and it was engineers that did that, built bridges and roads and automobiles, so we can get from one place to another relatively quickly because of that, because there are airplanes that were also developed by engineers in that century.

We designed a lot of new materials that could be used to build things that couldn’t have been done otherwise. Things like steel and polymers, or plastic and ceramics and, of course, computers which has progressed remarkably due to the work of engineers in your lifetime, until now you can carry around a cell phone, which would have been unthinkable even 30 years ago. Engineers in the twentieth century have transformed our society.

One of the other things that happened during the twentieth century is that human life expectancy increased dramatically, people started living a lot longer. So, what I plot on this graph here is as a function of time, years, dates, life expectancy as a function of time. What you’ll see here is that about for the period before sort of 1700 or so, human life expectancy was less than 40 years of age, so that means a person that was born in that year could expect to live on average about 40 years. That was the expected life span. And the expected life spans increased dramatically in the last couple of hundred years until now, or people that were born when you were born you can expect to live to be 80 years old, a doubling in life span, fairly dramatic.

So, what’s responsible for that? Why are people living longer than they did just a few hundred years ago? Well, there’s a clue here on the slide. I indicated a couple of points here where if we looked in the 1665 in London, you could ask the question, another way to ask the question why are people living so long is to ask the question, why do people die? In 1665, 93% of the people that died in that year died of infectious diseases. In contrast, if you look at a U.S. city, ten years ago in 1997 for example, then people still died but they didn’t die predominantly from infectious diseases. They died from other things, only four percent died from infectious diseases. So, one of the reasons there is a huge increase in life span is because people aren’t dying of things that they would have in prior years.

Biomedical Engineering Defined  Pt 9

Biomedical Engineering Defined Pt 8

Many of the things I showed you were things that were built from parts, that’s a good description. What makes it different from science? Science can be hands-on, you might be down at the lake picking up algae and studying them or something that would be hands-on. But what’s different, what would make you an engineer? Yeah? You design. Scientists observe and try to describe and engineers try to design.

They take those descriptions and the scientist that is known and they try to design new things, and so if you look at a dictionary, it has words like this that you’re doing designing things or another way to say that is that you’re trying to apply science, you’re looking at applications. We’re trying to take scientific information and make something new. The other thing about it is that you could make lots of things that are new but generally you think of engineers as making things that are not just new but they’re useful, that they do something that needs to be done and they do something that improves life, the quality of life of people.

So, here is a brief and very biased history of engineering. It’s short. Engineering became a discipline in about the middle of the 1800s. Lots of universities started teaching engineering as a discipline including Yale. In 1852, around that time, this might have been the first course that was offered in engineering in the country. It was taught at Yale in civil engineering in 1852 and even Yale students don’t know this. What a long distinguished history of engineering that their own institution has. In fact, the first PhD degree in engineering was awarded to a fellow named J. Willard Gibbs at Yale in 1863 for a thesis he did on how gears work or something, I forgot exactly what the details are, but have you heard of Gibbs? Is it a name that rings a bell? Where did you hear about Gibbs from? Yeah, G, Gibbs free energy, that annoying concept that you had to try to master in chemistry at some point, but Gibbs is really the father of modern physical chemistry and was one of the most famous scientists of the nineteenth century and got the first PhD in engineering here at Yale.

Then from these beginnings, engineers transformed life in the twentieth century. So, a lot of things started in the twentieth century and became common place.

Biomedical Engineering Defined  Pt 8

Biomedical Engineering Defined Pt 7

Because you trust biomedical engineers to have done a good job in designing these things and we’ll talk about how biomaterials are designed and tested and what makes a material, the properties of a material that you could use as a contact lens, what are the properties that it needs to have.

This is an example of an artificial hip. We’ve learned a lot about the mechanics of how humans work as organisms over the last 100 years or so, how we work as a sort of physical objects that have to obey the laws of physics that you know about. We live in a gravitational field and that it affects our day to day life, and if you have hip pain or a hip that’s diseased in some way, and you can’t stand up against that gravitational field in the same way, that severely limits what you can do in the world.

So, biomedical engineers have been working for many years on how to design replacement parts for joints like the hip. The artificial hip is the most well developed of those. We’ll talk about this in some detail. You can imagine that there are many requirements that a device like this has to meet in order for it to be a good artificial hip and we’ll talk about those and how the design of these has changed over the years and what we can expect in the future.

Lastly, up here, is a picture of a much smaller device. This is actually an artificial heart valve that is made of plastics and metal and can replace the valve inside your heart. Valvular disease is not uncommon in the world. We’ll talk about that a little bit. We’ll talk about how your normal valves function inside your heart and how your heart couldn’t work in the way that it did if it didn’t have valves that were doing a very complex operation many, many times a day. And then we’ll talk about how you can build something to replace a complicated small part in the body like that.

 

Well, let’s take a step back for a minute, that’s one way of looking at Biomedical Engineering by looking at sort of the things that you now about that have been the result of the work of biomedical engineers and talk more generally. But, what is engineering? What do engineers do? What makes engineering different than other fields of study? What makes it unique so that we have a school of engineering at Yale that’s separate from science and the humanities? Any thoughts? Yeah? It’s much more hands-on. You’re actually in there doing things.

Biomedical Engineering Defined  Pt 7

Biomedical Engineering Defined Pt 6

For example, you all know that the only treatment for some diseases is to get an organ transplant: a kidney transplant or a liver transplant is the only life extending intervention that can be done for some kinds of diseases.

Transplants require donors, and the donor organ is usually not at the same physical location that the recipient is, and so jets like this one have become very important in connecting donors to recipients. A team of surgeons is working to harvest an organ at one site while another team of surgeons is working to prepare the recipient at another site, and the organ is flown there.

Now, why does that happen? Because you have to get the organ from one place to another fast, right? The organ has to get from one place to another very rapidly and this is the fastest way to do it. Well, what if we could develop ways using engineering techniques to extend the life of an organ, so it didn’t have to get it where it went so quickly? Then that would open up lots of more possibilities for organ transplantation than are known now. What if we could figure out ways to avoid organ transplantation entirely? What if we could just take a few cells from that donor organ, ship them to the site, grow a new organ at the site and then implant it there? These are examples of Biomedical Engineering of the future that expand on what we currently use, which involves to no small extent, technology like this.

I would guess that probably 30% to 50% of you do this every day. You put a piece of plastic, a synthetic piece of plastic into your eye to improve your vision. Contact lens technology has changed dramatically from the time that I was born to the time that you were born, and the contact lenses you use today are much different than the ones that would have been used 30 years ago. This is Biomedical Engineering as well. Engineers who are developing new materials, materials that can be, if you think about it, there’s not very many things that you would want to put in your eye and that you would feel comfortable putting into your eye, so this is a very safe, a very inert material. What gives it those properties? What makes it so safe that it can be put in one of the most sensitive places in your body, in contact with your eyes? Why do you have confidence putting it in contact with one of the most important organs of your body?

Biomedical Engineering Defined  Pt 6

Intro to Chemical Engineering Lecture Pt. 6

Some may go as high as a quarter million barrels a day.  One refinery up in Venetia, where the ships come in and unload directly into the refinery and they process it.  They don’t even have storage for it.  Can you imagine running a business like that when the boat doesn’t come in? Or it hits something.  You are in bad shape.  But things like that don’t happen very often.  So they make gasoline, jet fuel and monomers.  So where does all the jet fuel from San Francisco airport comes from?  It comes from these refineries but you don’t see trucks coming in.  There are pipelines that go under the bay that carry jet fuel from the refinery directly to the airport, puts into underground tanks and the jets are fueled.  Jet fuel is really nothing more than kerosene basically; it has a certain boiling fraction of crude oil.  That means it boils at a certain temperature and jet engines are designed to accept that certain kind of fuel.

We can also make monomers and monomers are basically small molecules, say like ethylene and if you start attaching them to one another and many ethylene molecules together, what do you think you get?  Polyethylene.  You don’t get the bottles right away but you get the polyethylene which you then cast or mold or blow mold into bottles, milk cartons or whatever.

If I take polyethylene which is nothing but carbon, carbon, carbon with hydrogen hanging from them, then replace every other hydrogen with a chlorine atom.  I’ll get polyvinyl chloride.  If I replace everyone with a benzene ring, I get styrene.  If I replace all the hydrogens with fluorine, I get Teflon.  So it is kind of cool, isn’t it?  I mean this is how you get all the things you hear about all come from these monomers which get attached to each other like chains or railroad in a railroad car.  And polyethylene is up there.  Cute.  I can see now why.  (Laughter)

So silicon crystals, you probably don’t realize that Intel — who do you think Intel hires?  What kind of disciplines?  EEs, wrong.  There are more Chemical Engineers working at Intel than there are EEs.  In fact, Andy Grove was a classmate of mine and he was the president of Intel for many years.  Why on earth did I not go with him?  He’s living up here, big house.  I live down here, in a drain gutter.  I mean it is so awful.  But Andy Grove understood things like diffusion, reaction and chemistry and was able to help develop the technologies to grow very large, up to now 12-inch pure silicon crystals that are then cut into wafers under which you impress the architecture that results in the transistors that are basically collected together.  That of course, the EEs don’t make.  The EEs, if you will, are sort of the architect of what’s getting imprinted.  The Chemical Engineer provides the framework on which these can be drawn and does the cooking.  In other words, these things have to doped, and they have to be chemically reacted in order to get a chipset out of it.

Inorganic materials which are basically non-carbon containing materials result in such things as ceramics, and other raw materials such as glucose or sugars can be converted through biological means using microorganisms into things like pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals.  This is becoming a very, very huge industry particularly since Recom and DNA happened in the early 1970s where we now have control over the genome and we can take microorganisms that are surviving out there and the dirt and we can coax them to into making chemicals that otherwise, they wouldn’t have made because they just didn’t evolve to make those things, but we can use them as basically little engines, little machines and we can grow trillions and trillions of them in a test tube, you can generate a lot of production capacity.

Many of our students now go into besides refining or petrochemicals which is polymers production, which is still a very robust industry is protecting and improving the environment.  One, after you destroy the environment, and then you come and fix it up.  So there are two things that you do want to know.  The first thing is don’t destroy in the first place, but if you happen to, chemical engineers are very much involved in what is called remediation. One of the things that we have real problems with is that people have, over the years, sort of hawked down on the ground or punch a hole in the ground and they dump everything in it that they don’t want and lo and behold, it gets mixed up in the groundwater.

Introduction to Chemical Engineering Lecture Pt. 6
chemical engineering expert witness

Intro to Chemical Engineering Lecture Pt. 5

This guy is Peter Wilson.  He is actually Edwin Drake’s druggist and apparently this is a picture of the one of the very first drug deals.  You see his pants are quite full of something here and we’re not quite sure what’s going on.  Then there are these three stooges back here.

This is a derrick.  What happened to Pennsylvania is that people have noticed a sort of black stuff coming to the surface of the ground.  They also found out that if they lit it with fire, it would burn.  So he went poking around to see where this stuff was coming from and that was the first oil well.  And this was of course, in a sense, the beginning of chemical engineering.  Because chemical engineers originated, if you will, as a species that is to basically take oil which is a very, very complex set of nasty molecules and refine them into liquids and gases that are of use to society.  It could be methane, propane, ethane, butane, pentane and finally when you get to heptane and on up, this stuff becomes liquid at room temperature and they found out that if you took this stuff and boiled it, you could fractionate it into liquids and gases.  The gases could be used as fuels and the stuff that is really nasty, the tar could be put on to roads and this gave rise to this profession of chemical engineering as the people who refine oil.

Now, I have to tell you that probably in the last 20 years, not one of our undergraduates has gone into the oil business.  This is how it started, but we’ve transcended it.  It’s not that we do not refine oil anymore, we do, but we put in much figured out how to design oil refineries, essentially using software and computer programs that have imbedded in them the smartness to handle a variety of crudes and to produce products over the year that meet the market demands and so as you will learn on Friday, during the summer, the refineries are making heating oils for the winter and during winter, they are making gasolines for the summer.  And so the crude oil stream gets in and it gets changed molecularly into products that meet the market demand.  So it is not to demean refineries or to say that it’s a bad idea to go work for an oil company, but few of our graduates tend to do that.  I will talk about some of the other places where they do go. But that is for historical purposes.

What is Chemical Engineering?  It really is taking basis sciences: Physics, Math, Chemistry and now Biology, and applying them to the conversion of raw materials into valuable products.  It started out with crude oil into valuable products.  Doing it with a respect for the environment, which I can tell you was not in the picture for many, many years.  In fact, we are still litigating and I do participate in litigations of people who behave poorly in how they disposed of materials, even as latest as 1980s and early 1990s. Thinking that the world is a waste basket that can sup up anything we throw into it, but it is simply not the case anymore.

Chemical engineers design and manufacture useful products and this is done through chemical reactions, making and breaking bonds.  Usually when I get to this point, when I talk about catalysis, accelerating chemical reactions, separating and purifying things, people get scared.  They ask me, “Is there any Chemistry in this class?”  My answer to this is, “What don’t you understand about the word Chemical Engineering?”  I mean it is sort of taking an English class and learning Spanish.  Yes, we are going to talk about chemistry in here.  Is it deep chemistry?  It is not going to be deep chemistry.  It is something that you can all handle if you got three fully simultaneously functioning neurons at any given point in time.

So what do I mean by converting raw materials into products?  I will give you some examples.  We talked about crude oil.  There are refineries in the North Bay, up by Martinez, if you are familiar in that area.  There is also a big one along Highway 80 just north of Berkeley.  These will deal with around 100,000 barrels a day of crude oil coming in and running 24 hours a day.

Do anyone know how many gallons in a barrel?  55 in the kind of barrel that you normally see.  But unfortunately, that is not a barrel of oil and don’t ask me where it came from, but it’s 42 gallons. So if you look at the 100,000 x 42, in terms of how many gallons a modern refinery will handle.

Introduction to Chemical Engineering Lecture Pt. 5
chemical engineering expert witness

Introduction to Chemical Engineering Lecture Pt. 4

I told you that we have a webpage up under Course Works and we have Grading Groups.  When you want to come and complain and sort of scam for one or two more points, you’ll know who you’ll see because you know who graded your Problem Set.

I do have one thing, if you come in scamming for points, the TAs have the option to look through the rest of the Problem Set to take away points, if they thought that they are too generous.  So, it’s not necessarily a win-win proposition when you come in.  By the way, don’t turn anything late in this class, unless you’ve been hit by a bus and you are not conscious, that counts.  But if you are hit by a bus and you are conscious, you got to get the problems sent in on time.  Otherwise, we are going to start docking you massive points and that’s no fun because you need the points.

Let me go to, if I can — Max told me that this would be just seamless.  Of course, Max doesn’t know anything. (Laughter)  Up on the website, you will find every class, what’s the lecture is about, and if you look, you will see these superscripts right here.  At the end of this, you will see that these refer to books in the library.  Library probably might be a new word for you.  Google is not library.  It’s the largest collection of uncertified information on the face of the earth.  It is not a library.  You can go to a real place for real information called a library and look this up if you have any questions about the content of that particular lecture.  Here are the handouts or this is where we will be in the syllabus so you know where to turn.  This is when Homework #1 is given out and that’s today and this is when it is due.  This is the first field trip.  Your first field trip is on Monday, the 14th so there won’t be a problem session after that class because we are on a field trip.  Our other field trip is on May 19th, again on Monday and we are going to go to the Artificial Kidney Center over at the VA Hospital and so one of the things we are going to do in class is design an artificial kidney.  And then we are going to see one and you are going to see the people hooked up to one of them.  You will be able to talk to them.  You can surround them.  You can press the tubes, “Yeee!”  They’ll do the same things at the same places when you press the tubes because all their blood is running out into these machines and coming back.

And then we will have the Final which I have no control over.  It’s June 10th, Tuesday.  We have the last two lectures, Friday and Wednesday, were exactly not the last two, there is actually one in between.  But two of the lectures are Pre-Final Problem Sessions so we will work even more problems for you.  Hopefully by the time you arrive at the finals, everything will be cool.

So here’s again the TAs and here are the references 1 through 8.  These are the books in the library.  The library is the Swain Library which is about 50 feet here.

Okay.  So any questions about that?  This is all in Course Works.  The whole schedule is laid out before you.  You know what your life is going to be like and you should be very happy about that.  I will now shut this down.  Red, you said something about getting a real computer, wasn’t it?

What’s this?  (showing a photo) It’s an oil rig.  Does anybody have an idea where that oil rig is located and what year this picture was taken?  Pennsylvania.  Where and what city?  This is like trivia.  It starts with letter T and ends in ville.  Anyone from Pennsylvania here?  Anyone who admits to be from Pennsylvania here?  Titusville, Pennsylvania.  This picture was taken on August 28, 1859 and the person here is Edwin Drake.  How many have heard of him?  What did you know about him?

He founded a big oil company.

Wrong, but that’s okay.  By the way, this is a very safe class.  When I do the Socratic thing and I ask a rhetoric question and there is no answer, I just sit here until someone say something.  We will sit here all the time.  It is a very safe place, even if you are not sure and we may laugh at you. Don’t take it personally.  Nothing is personal in this class.  We will have fun.  Do your best, participate and it will be a lot better.

Introduction to Chemical Engineering Lecture Pt. 4
chemical engineering expert witness

Five Civil Engineering Jobs that Don’t Involve Field Work

Civil Engineering Experts

If you’re unable to go out into the field for whatever reason, fear not for the civil engineering world still has a place for you. Whether you are allergic to dust, hate to travel, or have claustrophobia or vertigo, there is something else for you to do. Here are five civil engineering expert jobs that won’t lead to anaphylactic shock, motion sickness, or embarrassing revelations to coworkers.

Project Manager

On the condition that you’re especially skilled at task delegation and remote monitoring, you’ll never actually have to go on site for any reason. Project managers for civil engineering ventures usually only oversee the undertaking and spend most of their time creating reports and relaying to top management. They are also most likely to deal with the heads that do the actual on-site visits.

Cost Analyst

Those with a degree in civil engineering and a love for estimates and statistical data should consider landing a cost analyst’s job at a construction firm. Far from the dust and grime of a construction site, you’ll spend your days inside an air-conditioned office trying to make ends meet and within budget. Be forewarned that there will be a lot of pressure and office politics involved.

Professor

The saying should be, “those who don’t want to do, teach”. Be one of the select few who help inspire and guide young minds to flourishing careers in civil engineering. Just make sure to stick to courses that involve theory alone or at least very few field trips.

CAD Designers and Drafters

You’ll be stuck in the office at odd hours working on the latest civil engineering designs but at least you won’t be laughed at for hyperventilating inside dark tunnels. This is, as hinted, a possibly stressful job that will cut into your social life. Be prepared as well to rip your hair out whenever new but “small” adjustments and specifications are added into the mix.

GIS Specialists

A Geographical Information System is a program that gathers, displays, evaluates and manipulates topographical data. As long as you’re not the one capturing or surveying the actual locations, you will be fine. Civil engineering professionals can find themselves in this domain if they have backgrounds in cartography, programming or analysis.

There are many more jobs out there for civil engineering graduates that don’t involve getting dirty or going on incessant business trips. Keep in mind though that you might just be trading in one problem for another.

Using the Services of a Chemical Engineering Expert Witness

Chemical engineers have a major function in the management and designing of chemical plants. Being the engineers, they must be familiar with every danger related to the job. All locations for work have risks; however, working in an environment with deadly chemicals needs protective measures. When security is observed, employees can avoid risks of damage and injury that may happen to them and to the property.

In chemical industries, wherein chemical professionals work, there are many harmful substances to be careful about. People know that there are high dangers when work environment is surrounded with chemicals.

A serious situation happened when an employee is asked to transport a barrel containing strong acid chemical to the plant. A barrel was a wrong type of container forchemicals. It has no durable materials like metal. Consequently, the acid burned through the barrel and also burned the legs and feet of the worker carrying it. It made the employee to be out of work for a long time while recovering from the acquired injuries. People thought that the employee deserved compensation due to the physical harm happened to him.

However, people could be wrong in assuming that compensation is automatically given to the employee—although he may be entitled to it. They think it is possible to have claims because of the acquired injury. An important aspect to consider is whether the injured employee did all he could do to minimize the chances of danger or not. Specific procedures must have taken place prior to the occurrence of the accident. Was the employee wearing the right safety clothes? It’s part of his responsibility to care for himself and ensure protective clothes were worn appropriately.

For this case, there is a need for chemical engineering expert witness. It is very important to have a consultation before attempting to get a claim. There are reliable chemical engineering experts that can give advice to support the employee about his case. Expert witnesses possess the authority required by the court jury. Their testimony is used in making the right decision for the judges. Chemical engineers are certified professionals who assist the jurors in the court. They are the ones to help the client to create the most possible defense for his case.

Many companies and organizations have broad networks of chemical engineering professional witness. Many of these experienced people have excellent testifying experiences. They have also worked as skilled speakers, and they have been quoted in publication and news.