When James Mandell, MD, outgoing CEO of Boston Children’s Hospital, introduced keynote speaker Robert Langer, PhD, at the National Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards, he shared one of Langer’s favorite quotes. “When scientific literature says something isn’t possible, you just have to create possibilities that don’t exist.”
Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the most cited engineer in history, walked the audience through the trials and tribulations he encountered in his four-decade career as an innovator.
When he finished his ScD in chemical engineering in 1974, Langer was heavily courted by the oil and gas industries, which aimed to leverage the knowledge of young chemical engineers to address the oil crisis. But that work didn’t appeal to him.
Instead, Langer was taken with the idea of teaching chemistry to underserved youth. Unfortunately, he could not secure a position with any of the 40-odd programs to which he applied.
Eventually, a colleague suggested to him that Judah Folkman, MD, a pioneering cancer researcher at Boston Children’s, sometimes hired “interesting people.” Langer took the bait and joined Folkman’s lab in the mid-1970s.
“I may have been the only engineer in the place. I learned so much because everyone’s backgrounds were so different,” he recalled. …