With great fanfare and lots of money, universities across the United States are launching bioengineering programs faster than you can say "genomics."

In the past three years, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Duke University, and at least a half-dozen other major campuses have formed full-fledged bioengineering departments. Now, schools in the hinterlands are jumping on board. In March, the University of Central Oklahoma announced plans to begin an undergraduate program in biomedical engineering - the first in the state - this fall. Mississippi State University will start a graduate program, the first at any level in that state. According to the Whitaker Foundation - which has been a significant spur to the trend - 90 institutions in the United States and Canada offer degree-granting programs in bioengineering, up from 80 just a year ago, and 50 more are developing them.

Undergraduate enrollment in biomedical engineering has more than doubled in the past 20 years; graduate enrollment has tripled. And no wonder: advances in genomics, molecular biology, and computational modeling have revolutionized the study of biology and its applications. "Biology is not just about worms and poop and mud, and it's not yucky," says Thomas Budinger, chair of the Berkeley bioengineering department. "It has logic to it. It has mechanisms that are measurable."

All engineering is based on measurable disciplines - traditionally, physics, chemistry, and mathematics. With the molecular revolution, biology has joined these on center stage. On the flip side, technology has advanced to the point that it can be used to study, and manipulate, life at its tiniest scale. The result of these dual developments: bioengineering is not just about building hip joints and dialysis machines. It can now address profound, influential questions. Can you create cell- or protein-based drug delivery systems? Design medical devices on a nanometer scale using principles of biology? Build an imaging machine that detects cancer at its inception? Engineer a liver?

"Every time you have an explosion in a basic science, people see new opportunities," says Douglas Lauffenburger, codirector of the division of bioengineering and environmental health at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "There is a new science here, which means there's going to be a new engineering here, and new biotechnologies here, and new impacts across a broad range of industry and society."

And new jobs. The medical technology industry is one of the fastest growing in the world. Employment for engineers in this sector is expected to increase 33 percent from 1998 to 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, compared to a 20 percent increase in engineering jobs overall.

Ripe as the market is, bioengineering education would not have taken off so dramatically without the Virginia-based Whitaker Foundation. "They've been a singular catalyst," Lauffenburger says. "They've been way out in front trying to move this field forward."

The foundation was established in 1975 upon the death of Uncas Whitaker, an inventor and engineer who made his fortune manufacturing electrical connectors. Long before "interdisciplinary" became a buzzword, Whitaker was interested in collaborations between engineers and medical researchers. The early foundation officials decided to make biomedical engineering research their priority.

Before Whitaker, bioengineering projects often fell through the funding cracks. The work was generally considered not medical enough for the National Institutes of Health and too medical for the National Science Foundation. Whitaker grants not only advanced the research, but also boosted the legitimacy of a discipline that had previously been considered soft compared with electrical or mechanical engineering.

In the early 1990s, Whitaker executives decided to spend all the assets and close up shop by 2006. As their mission and eventual legacy, they chose biomedical engineering education. At the time, few campuses offered bioengineering degrees. Programs such as the University of California San Francisco and Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering tended to be small and loosely run by professors from a variety of departments. Whitaker started awarding major grants to universities to develop or expand bioengineering training: $15 million to Berkeley, $17 million to Hopkins, $18 million to UCSD. By 2006, when the doors shut, Whitaker will have spent $1 billion, almost all of it in this area.

Whitaker says it lets researchers set their own priorities. "We feel very strongly we should not dictate where the field is going," explains Peter Katona, Whitaker's president. "We should identify good universities and good researchers and let them decide." The upshot: programs vary widely in their approach - sometimes even in their very definition of bioengineering.

Many programs, particularly newer departments, are "going small," Katona says. They focus almost wholly on cellular and molecular engineering. But universities that have been in the field longer - and professors who have spent careers studying biomechanics - tend to take a larger view. "People are able to begin to integrate from the lowest levels at the molecular scale up to whole-body scale," says Steve Lehman, an associate professor of integrative biology who used to head the UCSF/UCB Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering. "The whole story isn't the human genome. It's all of these levels."

The Whitaker Foundation may not favor one approach over another, but the development grants do come with strings. Chiefly, Whitaker presses recipients to create separate bioengineering departments, not interdisciplinary programs on the boundaries of several departments. This has provoked debate at some schools, such as Berkeley, where loose-knit bioengineering groups have been forerunners to the interdisciplinary approach now in vogue in cutting-edge science. "The trend has been for people to cross boundaries, for people to collaborate broadly," Lehman says. "Boundaries between departments have become much more fuzzy." Imposing a departmental structure on bioengineering, a field that naturally straddles chemistry, mathematics, biology, and physics, is, Lehman feels, both "a good thing and a bad thing."

"Departments have things that graduate programs don't have," he explains. "They have their own faculty. And money from the campus. And space, and buildings." But something intangible may be sacrificed in building a formal department. "What's lost is the sort of openness and democracy that you have in loose-knit groups that share a common interest."

Katona, however, says that departments have what it takes to make bioengineering a "mainstream" discipline: power, authority, and permanence. Berkeley's bioengineering department is a case in point. When Berkeley created a bioengineering department in 1998, the first new department in the School of Engineering in 40 years, the university had 191 bioengineering undergraduates and 55 in the graduate group. By 2003, there will be 300 undergraduates, 100 graduate students, and six new faculty members. Whitaker pushes for departments, Katona says, "not because we like boundaries but because of the clout."

Certainly, the field needs more clout. Bioengineering has been around for 50 years, but executives at many biomedical companies still view electrical and mechanical engineers as the"real thing" - better trained, more technically adept than people with bioengineering degrees. Katona says the bias is easing, but not fast enough. No doubt the qualities that make bioengineering so popular among students also make it a tough sell to corporate America. "It's the most diverse and liberal-artish" of the engineering disciplines," says Jove Graham, who is about to earn a Ph.D. from the UCSF/UCB Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering. "You learn some biology, some chemistry, and you get an engineering background."

That diversity poses a huge challenge for burgeoning departments. "Everyone - the biologists, the chemists, the engineers in each discipline - has different opinions on what should be important classes to take. When all these people get a say in curriculum planning, you can end up with students calling themselves bioengineers who've had a lot of biology and a lot of chemistry but aren't necessarily well-trained in any specific engineering skill or [able to] point to any particular subject and say, 'I know that well,'" says Graham.

Bioengineering chairs have been on a faculty hiring binge, but it is no secret that curriculum development has lagged behind the creation of new departments. Last December, about 300 academics gathered for the first national summit on bioengineering curricula. The meeting was organized and hosted - no surprise! - by the Whitaker Foundation.