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Biomedical Engineering Timespan
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Stethoscope idea
In 1816, modesty prevented French physician Rene Laennec from placing his ear next to a young woman’s bare chest, so he rolled up a newspaper and listened through it, triggering the idea for his invention that led to today’s ubiquitous stethoscope. -
Electrophysiology
An early landmark in electrophysiology occurred in 1848 when DuBois Reymond published the widely recognized Ueber die tierische Elektrizitaet. -
X-Rays Discovered
In 1895, Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered that a cathode-ray tube could make a sheet of paper coated with barium platinocyanide glow, even when the tube and the paper were in separate rooms. Roentgen decided the tube must be emitting some kind of penetrating rays, which he called “X” rays for unknown. This set off a flurry of research into the tissue-penetrating and tissue-destroying properties of X-rays, a line of research that ultimately produced the modern array of medical imaging tec -
Training begins
Between World War I and World War II a number of laboratories undertook research in biophysics and biomedical engineering. Only one offered formal training: the Oswalt Institute for Physics in Medicine, established in 1921 in Frankfurt, Germany, forerunner of the Max Planck Institute fur Biophysik. -
Biophysical Society
Following the Second World War, administrative committees began forming around the combined areas of engineering, medicine and biology. A biophysical society was formed in Germany in 1943 -
U.S. Conference
The first conference of engineering in medicine and biology convened in the United States, under the auspices of the Institute of Radio Engineers (forerunner of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the American Institute for Electrical Engineering, and the Instrument Society of America. -
Biomedical Engineering Support
Also in the early 1960s the NIH took three significant steps to support biomedical engineering. First, it created a program-project committee under the General Medical Sciences Institute to evaluate program-project applications, many of which served biophysics and biomedical engineering. Then it set up a biomedical engineering training study section to evaluate training-grant applications, and it established two biophysics study sections. A special “floating” study section processed applications -
Theory and Practice
The society awarded the Alza Distinguished Lectureship to encourage the theory and practice of biomedical engineering. The BMES Distinguished Lectureship Award was founded in 1991 to recognize outstanding achievements in biomedical engineering. -
As a step toward unification, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering was created in 1992
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Wooden prosthetic discovered
In 2000, German archeologists uncovered a 3,000-year-old mummy from Thebes with a wooden prosthetic tied to its foot to serve as a big toe -
Creations of Institutes
A major development took place in late 2000 when President Clinton signed a bill creating the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the NIH -
NIH Improvements
The newest of the NIH institutes, NIBIB spent much of 2001 building program and administrative staff, preparing a budget request, setting up office space, determining funding and grant identification codes and procedures, and identifying program (research, training, and communication) focus areas and opportunities. -
Grants and Research
NIBIB assumed administration of the NIH's Bioengineering Consortium (BECON) in September 2001, and awarded its first research grant in April 2002.
