The societal implications of emerging, massive problems such as energy supply and aging population confront all of us, and as chemical engineers, we need to respond to these challenges. Over the past few decades, chemical engineering has embraced revolutions in experimental and mathematical methodologies employed to probe and understand atomic/molecular-level phenomena, and it is now time to deploy these methodologies to attack the large-scale problems confronting society in the 21st century. I will address how chemical engineering is well positioned to this by illustrating examples from work of others and my own work on creating new therapeutics for cancer.