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MIT professor Robert Langer is named the “Edison of Medicine” — he holds 1,050 patents and is one in all America’s most prolific inventors.
Langers describes what a significant profession seems to be like — struggles and all. “Obviously you don’t want to keep banging your head against the wall forever, so I think there’s some compromises you have to make.”His finest profession recommendation? Choose that means over cash. Langer was interviewed by 20 oil corporations at the start of his profession, and was supplied profitable jobs at every of them. He turned all of them down, took a job at a kids’s hospital, and went on to alter the way forward for medication.
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ROBERT LANGER
Robert S. Langer accomplished his undergraduate research in Chemical Engineering at Cornell University and obtained his Sc.D in Chemical Engineering at MIT. He joined MIT as Assistant Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry in 1978. Dr. Langer has written over 1,250 articles and in addition has almost 1,050 patents worldwide. Dr. Langer’s patents have been licensed or sublicensed to over 250 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical machine corporations.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Robert Langer: I do advise my college students to be broad and open-minded of their pondering on the subject of careers. I imply, mainly what you need is any person to have a nice profession and be joyful; and, you realize, so my recommendation to college students is to don’t do what’s going to make you probably the most cash or probably the most safety, however do one thing that may make you cheerful — no matter that’s.
Well after I obtained carried out with graduate faculty, or after I was ending graduate faculty, this was the Nineteen Seventies and there was this fuel scarcity identical to a few years in the past and the costs of fuel stored going up. So, what that meant was, in the event you have been a chemical engineer, like I used to be, is you’d get a lot of job affords from oil corporations. And just about all my classmates went to grease corporations and labored there and so they obtained very high-paying jobs.
I did get 20 job interviews from these corporations, and I obtained 20 affords, too, however I wasn’t very enthusiastic about doing that. I keep in mind one interview the place they advised me if I may simply enhance the yield of this one petrochemical by .1 % that may be price billions of {dollars}, and I simply wasn’t excited in regards to the influence that that may have, and I stored in search of methods the place I suppose I felt I may have extra of an influence on the world.
Well, let me give an instance of 1 factor we did. Actually, after I was a postdoctoral fellow with Judah Folkman one of many questions that we requested was: may molecules exist that would cease blood vessels from rising within the physique? Lots of people didn’t imagine that that would occur, however my boss on the time, Dr. Folkman, did, and he employed me and we discovered that cartilage was in a position to block blood vessels. This was carried out with Henry Brem as properly.
And then we discovered what — we wished to see if we may discover an extract. In different phrases, what are the actual substances that would cease blood vessels from rising which may exist. And properly there’s a lot of issues — you must break up the issues into completely different components. So first the place would possibly a molecule exist that would cease blood vessels?
The reply to that was probably cartilage, which doesn’t have blood vessels. Then you must have a approach to research it, and that was very, very onerous as a result of blood vessels really develop slowly over time, and we would have liked what we name as a bioassay. And to develop a bioassay we would have liked one thing that would launch these substances for a very, very very long time. So a little polymer or microsphere or microparticle.
So we developed these however none of these had ever been in a position to slowly launch molecules that have been actually large. And the molecules that we thought would cease blood vessels have been actually large. So we needed to really then create methods to launch these molecules slowly though they have been large, and launch them for months. And that was one thing folks by no means thought was attainable. But I spent a number of years engaged on it, experimenting with completely different strategies, and finally I found out a approach to do it. And after we did that we revealed a paper in Nature displaying that for the primary time you possibly can launch molecules of any measurement from these little microparticles. And then we used that to create the bioassay and we remoted the primary substances that would cease blood vessels from rising within the physique. Both of these discoveries, the polymer slow-rele…
For the total transcript, take a look at https://bigthink.com/videos/career-advice-from-the-edison-of-medicine
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