A FUTURE FOR AUSTRALIAN BIOTECHNOLOGY THROUGH PARTNERING SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING

If Australians are to reap the benefit of fundamental biotechnology research, then a major directional adjustment in education must be taken. In addition, there are at least four critical issues that industry, government and higher educational institutions have to face. Biotechnology education trains people to apply the principles of science and engineering to use living organisms or substances derived from them, to generate products or to perform functions that can benefit human and agricultural systems. However, translating research findings to industrial scale-up to produce and purify biomolecules requires the skills of bioprocess engineers, a breed of graduate of great rarity on the Australian continent. The critical issues needing to be addressed by industry and government sponsoring education are: 1. To identify those skills, discoveries and concepts in the science disciplines that are necessary to produce good bioprocess engineers. 2. To identify and eliminate those barriers to the training and exploitation of bioprocess engineers. 3. To produce enough graduates so that Australia can remain competitive in the world economy. 4. To facilitate the research and training of bioprocess engineers in a community that is largely scientifically illiterate and suspicious of many aspects of biotechnology. The challenge the Australian biotechnology industry faces, in light of its backward performance as compared to American and European developments, is in accessing a supply of employees who are competent in the many skills necessary to take a product from conception to production. The United States of America will continue to dominate the biotechnology market and as a result Australia will continually lose competent biotechnicians to these overseas interests. Bioprocess engineers are the linchpins Australia needs to translate its biotechnology discoveries into products to benefit society and to capture markets. The pathway to achieving this is to develop closer partnerships in teaching and research between engineering and life science faculties