ASAE's Role in Biological EngineeringWelcome to this focus issue of Resource highlighting ASAE's role in biological engineering. No human activity is more biological than agriculture, so it makes sense that the American Society of Agricultural Engineers should be a leader in biological engineering.The biological characteristics of the materials we process, the crops we plant and nurture, and the animals we house, set some of the boundaries within which we design our systems. Recently to some extent, and immensely more so in the future, we are learning to modify those characteristics and expand the boundaries of our workspace of possibilities. We've also expanded the boundaries of our creative thinking to see the biological world as more than a source of food, feed, and fiber. Living systems can work small miracles, as the articles on bioremediation in this issue point out. Biological systems can respond to the presence of materials our human senses could never detect. Those response mechanisms can be harnessed to form biosensors that can provide data to a control system in the same fashion as a torque meter or a pH probe. Engineering is science at work. Biological engineering is biological science at work, taking our knowledge of living systems and integrating it with the mathematics, physics, and chemistry that form the historic basis of engineering. Engineers are trained to think in terms of systems, even when they are focused on only a single element of a complex process or machine. Biological engineering adds a new dimension to the system, opening up design possibilities we haven't even known we could dream about. Lyle E. Stephens ASAE President |