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 Hospitals with
 traditions of excellence have
 demonstrated abundantly that
      Research enhances the vitality of teaching,
      Teaching lifts the standards of services, and
      Service opens new avenues of investigation.

  [J. Masur, M.D. NIH - Bethesda, Maryland, USA.]

Molecular biology is the science that attempts to understand the molecular basis of gene expression and the processes that regulate cellular phenomena. Medical research also attempts to understand the nature of diseases. Molecular medicine - biomedicine - encompasses the discovery of fundamental molecular components that determine normal cellular behaviour, the dissection of aberrant genetic expression or interaction, and the modulation and correction of those aberrations for the purpose of disease prevention and cure. Gene therapy -the delivery and expression of a correct copy of a gene into cells in which endogenous gene is nonfunctional- is the paradigm of the molecular medicine.

Simultaneously, here is an emerging active partnership between people and machines to do certain skilled tasks better than either can do alone. Human have many capabilities, but they do have limitations. Machines have complementary capabilities that can remedy some of these defects. Rapid technological advances in electronics and computer sciences have set the stage for an unprecedent drive toward improvement in existing medical devices and the development of exciting new ones. Powered by computers and aided by fundamental advances in physics, chemistry and biology, and array of new techniques is making it possible to observe phenomena that until recently could only be inferred. These developments indicate that a new age of image in biomedicine is under way, an era that will lead to sharp changes in the role of images in science. Medical imaging is the second paradigm in current medicine.

New medical devices with numerous therapeutic applications continue proliferate. Bionic, in the medical sense, refers to the development of artificial organs. The term also refers to any electromechanical device that is made to emulate the behaviour of a living organism (robot). As is typical of any technical field that is not yet fully structured, there is often a certain amount of redundancy between component concepts and subdisciplines: computer-assisted surgery, image-guided medicine, computer-integrated medicine, computer-integrated surgery, computer-assisted medical interventions, ... .

Above all, the medical discipline acquires knowledge with a purpose: to use it for prevention, cure, and care. The doctors had to integrate the new advances to make them suitable for application in patient care. The dominant model of disease today is biomedical, with molecular biology its basic scientific discipline. But man is more than a biological organism. He is also a sentient being, a being which can feel, perceive, and remember. Our model of man is hopelessly incomplete if it ignores subjectivity. The problems of fragmentation can be overcome by teaching integrated medicine: from DNA to man. Molecular biologists, clinicians, and engineers look at the same disease at different levels. It is a great challenge to bring them together in the process of integrated teaching, trainning, and practice.