President's Message

Many years ago when I was doing biomedical research I had occasion to carefully study what is now a classic medical textbook [Ref 1]. It explained that the human body is composed of thousands of control systems; some operate at the cellular level, some at the level of organs and some at the whole-body level. Examples of these systems include the regulation of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the extracellular fluid as well as the insulin control system that maintains the concentration of glucose in the blood. Life goes on when all these control systems function properly. Moderate dysfunction of some of these control systems results in illness, while extreme dysfunction results in death. This, I believe, has some parallels to complex engineered systems.