Drew Endy — American Scientist

Andrew David Endy is a synthetic biologist and Tenured Professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, California... (wikipedia)

Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications.
If you can write DNA, you're no longer limited to 'what is' but to what you could make.
The scope of material I can work with is not limited to the set of things that we inherit from nature.