Control systems in tissue engineering

Tissue engineering has a lot of potential for growth. Recently I came across an article on Technology Review mag published by the famous institution MIT..... that discussess the Tissue engineering.

They quote....."Tissue engineers are ambitious. If they had their way, a dialysis patient could receive a new kidney made in the lab from his own cells, instead of waiting for a donor organ that his immune system might reject. Likewise, a diabetic could, with grafts of lab-made pancreatic tissue, be given the ability to make insulin again. But tissue engineering has stalled in part because bioengineers haven't been able to replicate the structural complexity of human tissues. Now researchers have taken an important first step toward building complex tissues from the bottom up by creating what they call living Legos. These building blocks, biofriendly gels of various shapes studded with cells, can self-assemble into complex structures resembling those found in tissues."

According to a bioengineer Ali Khademhosseini, at Harvard Medical School
"Living tissues have repeating functional units. The liver, for example, is made
up of repeated hexagonal lobes. Each has a central branching vessel that brings
in blood for filtration; the vessel and its branches are surrounded by
toxin-filtering cells surrounded by canals that transport filtered blood to
other vessels leading out of the organ".

Khademhosseini method works on the basic principle that water and oil don't mix.

"When water is dropped into a pool of oil, it will form a sphere, the shape that
minimizes its interaction with the oil."Bioengineers seed cells onto the outside
of polymer scaffolds in the hopes that they will migrate inside and organize
themselves.

Controlling the cell organization is the most important part of the entire process. We might soon be able to replicate parts like pancreas, liver and heart muscle.

It might seem very far fetch at this point of time but I do believe that automation companies would come up with higher competant control systems for tissue engineering.

To know more about Khademhosseini wonderful research you may visit http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotechhappy reading!!

control system cyber security

I recently read an article "Peril in the pipeline" by Marshall Abrams and Joe Weiss. The article is more eyeopening rather than interesting as it investigates deeper into the unresponsiveness of the SCADA system on 10 June 1999 which was controlling the pipeline system owned by Olympic Pipeline Company. The system could not detect the rupture in 16inch dia pipeline which in turn resulted in gasoline leaking into the Hanna and Whatcom Creeks in Whatcom Falls Park within Bellingham, Wash.
The effects of the disaster were tremendous causing injuries to people and killing two 10-year-old boys and an 18 year old man.

Both Marshall and Joe admit that "
.... more discussion is needed about control system cyber security and how its policies and countermeasures can potentially preclude or minimize the impacts of a control system cyber security event....."

The SCADA system consisted of........

SCADA vector (object-based editing) software running on two virtual
asset extension (VAX) computers with virtual memory system (VMS) operation
system Version 7.1. [VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an
orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i.e.,
demand paged virtual memory)]

In addition to this there was a seperate computere for pipeline leak detection system software package. As Marshall and Joe point out...

"The VAX-VMS was designed to be a multi-user system and was capable of keeping
track of hundreds of simultaneous users. Each user was allocated his/her
share of system resources, and each user was only permitted to run or view
files associated with that person’s user identification (login). Extensive
operating system accountability and permission logs documented the resources
used by any user. Only one login was employed by all Olympic operators,
which allowed them to have undifferentiated system administrator privileges,
including manipulation or deletion of any file on the system."

Three reasons were given for this accident, firstly the damage, gouges, and dents to the pipeline in the vicinity of the eventual rupture. Second was the construction and startup of the Bayview products terminal. Some pressure elief vakves were installed initially which were later founs to be improperly installed and configured. Last but the most important the SCADA system became unresponsive making things extremely tough for the controllers.

Digging deeper into Why the SCADA system was not able to respond the report of the National Transportation Safety Board......

"There was no indication of an in-place cyber security program, including control system policies and procedures"

The forensic report showed that......

A comprehensive control system cyber security program was not in place nor
was appropriate SCADA operator training. The SCADA system appeared
to have diagnostics capabilities, but those capabilities were not
configured to address internal cyber issues. In addition, system logs that should have been automatically generated were inexplicably missing. The single backbone Ethernet network did not provide adequate separation from the real-time systems and non-critical business network."

Though the technology has improved a lot today but the ghosts of 10th June 1999 will continue to haunt the control system professionals and keep reminding them that a mistake in ther job might cause precious human lives.

The Olympic Pipeline Company has subsequently gone out of business.

The complete article can be found on ISAs' website"http://www.isa.org/InTechTemplate.cfm?Section=Article_Index1&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=69643"

Marshall Abrams is a principal scientist at MITRE Corporation, a national resource center with expertise in systems engineering and information technology in McLean, Va. and Joe Weiss Joe Weiss, LLC PE, CISM, is an executive consultant at Applied Control Solutions in Cupertino, Calif.