Engineers are the ones doing the research in many if not all fields of science. We try to keep ahead of our competitors through new ways of doing things. Ryan labs, our research center, is staffed by engineers. I don't know who else would be qualified to do the research necessary. If a concept is deemed worthy of investment the manufacturing engineers take over the project. Once in production test engineering comes into play along with the engineers in quality control.
GE, Dupont, Bell Labs, JP labs all are staffed by engineers researching the future of their field of science. Bio-engineering does research in... well, biology.
Need to get up to date about this idea of what engineering is I think.
http://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/Bioengineering/TheEmergenceofBioengineering.aspx
The Emergence of Bioengineering
During the latter half of this century, there has been a revolution in the biological sciences. Biology has truly come of age, achieving an importance equal to that of physics and chemistry. The March 10, 1997, issue of Business Week highlighted this fact by declaring the arrival of "The Biotech Century." The magazine was bold enough to state that "biology will define scientific progress in the 21st century."
Although some date the ascendancy of the biological sciences to the work of Watson and Crick (1953), which revealed the double-helix structure of DNA, there was a significant advance earlier in the century that laid the foundation for the exciting developments that we have witnessed in recent years. This advance was, in a very literal sense, a "cultural revolution," one that made it possible to grow living, biological cells in the research laboratory. I refer, of course, to the advent of cell culture (Leff, 1983). This "out-of-body" technology has made possible much of what we have learned about cell and molecular biology over the past 50 years. This is not to in any way underrate the achievement of Watson and Crick, for their work led us to our knowledge of a cell's genetic program and the development of recombinant DNA technology. The first products resulting from this technology began to appear more than a decade ago.