At left: New Institute to Seeks to Serve Physicists and Engineers
Medical physicists and bioengineers aim to gain visibility, funding, and clout with the creation of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), which became the latest addition to the National Institutes of Health family when it was signed into law in the waning hours of the Clinton presidency.Mapping the BrainNIBIB was born of frustration: "People who work in engineering and imaging have major difficulties selling their projects to NIH," says Ferenc Jolesz. He should know. As head of magnetic resonance imaging and image-guided therapy programs at Harvard Medical School's Brigham and Women's Hospital, Jolesz oversees about 100 researchers and an annual budget of $10 million. "We have physicians, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists. Our projects can be good for many things--the brain, the heart, the lungs. It's very difficult to fit into the culture of NIH, which is driven by organ- or disease-oriented research. You have to fake it and say you are doing something for a specific disorder."
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