From Bill Tango, Sydney, Australia
In 1965, I started postgraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During a presentation on a new degree programme in bioengineering, the speaker apologised that a short course in biology would be required, saying that it was trivial for engineers to pick up the biology basics, but, of course, you couldn’t expect a biologist to master all the necessary engineering principles. I thought at the time that it was staggeringly condescending, but it may have been an early shoot of what Aleks Krotoski describes as “engineer’s syndrome” in her book 0n the “tech bros” aiming to cheat death (25 October, p 25).
