Review by Choice Review
Biomedical engineering is the newest of the engineering disciplines, so the canon of biomedical engineering textbooks is very much a work in progress. That said, this new volume intended for an introductory course in biomedical engineering is the best that this reviewer has seen. Saltzman (chemical and biomedical engineering, Yale Univ.) has written excellent upper-level textbooks on the topics of drug delivery and tissue engineering. One hallmark of this new introductory work is the focus on the foundational principles from the sciences of biology, chemistry, and physiology, rather than simply a presentation of a litany of specific technology applications. The author discusses important fundamental concepts from engineering science, such as balance equations, in the context of physiological processes like respiration and digestion. An interesting feature of the work is the inclusion of a number of self-written profiles of contemporary biomedical engineering researchers such as Douglas Lauffenburger and Robert Langer, providing interesting reading as well as candid examples of different career paths possible in this discipline. The book is decidedly focused more on the cellular and molecular aspects of bioengineering, but there is some treatment of other subfields such as biomechanics and electrical instrumentation in the last part of the volume. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates. M. R. King Cornell University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
