A catalyst of the bioengineering field plans its farewell.

A catalyst of the bioengineering field plans its farewell The Whitaker Foundation is closing its doors next year. The organization was set up in 1976 to award grants and support research and education, particularly in biomedical engineering, and was uniquely designed to have a finite life. Now, having completed its mission and achieved the goals it was set up to accomplish, the foundation has started to phase out its funding programs. " Few foundations spend out, " explained Frank Blanchard, director of communications at the Whitaker foundation. " I believe we are unique in not only spending out but being able to demonstrate a significant impact on the academic landscape. " Blanchard told the JCI that for years, the Whitaker Foundation was the only institution in the country that gave any organized support to the then up-and-coming field of biomedical engineering. The foundation has been instrumental in doubling the number of academic bioen-gineering departments, getting hundreds of biomedical engineers started in their careers, and building an infrastructure that will serve the field for years to come. The foundation drew so much attention to the emerging field that other funding agencies soon added their support. As a result, bioengineering evolved from an undeveloped new area to become the well-established yet still expanding discipline it is today. Because the foundation has played such a big role in taking bioengineering into the academic mainstream, the question of why it would close it doors and what influence this termination will have on the future of the field looms large. The vision of the Whitaker Foundation, as stated by its chairman, is that by 2006, biomedical engineering will have evolved and gained acceptance to the point that it does not require this type of supplemental funding. At the foundation's inception , however, biomedical engineering investigators were having a hard time getting grants to fund their work. " The grant was critical to me at that time of my career. I was not prepared to compete in the NIH arena for funding, " says Peter Ma, who received a Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Research Grant for his work on cartilage scaffolds, used for tissue regeneration. " The Whitaker grant helped my career tremendously during the transition to NIH-supported research directions, " Ma says. Darrell Irvine received one of the last Bioengineering Research Grants from the Foundation in 2003. Irvine, who studies immune cell interactions using synthetic collagen …