Re:What's so amazing about this? (Score 2, Informative)

Biosystems Engineering Majors are incredibly common. Almost all land grant universities have had them for over 10 years. When biotech started getting popular, all the land grant universities changed their agriculture engineering departments to biological engineering departments. They changed the courses to reflect more environmental and biological topics. The professional society for biological engineering is ASAE(American Society of Agricultural Engineers). Biological engineering is well defined and is considered engineering systems that relate to the creation of food products, handling of plants and animals, and processing of these biological materials. This is different than biomedical engineering which is directed just at the human body and generally involves creating replacement parts(heart valves). It doesn't look like MIT's major will be following the standard biological engineering program, so they should probably call it something else to avoid confusion (maybe celluar engineering). A few of the schools with well-established biological or biosystems engineering degrees: Kansas State University (Biological & Agricultural Engineering) Texas A&M University (Biological & Agricultural Engineering) Iowa State University (Agricultural & Biosystems Engineering) Nebraska University (Biological Systems and Agricultural Engineering) Oklahoma State University (Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering) I am a student in the BAE department at Oklahoma State University. Just to let everyone know that biological engineering has been around for a long time.