Career advice from the “Edison of medicine”
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MIT professor Robert Langer is named the “Edison of Medicine” — he holds 1,050 patents and is one of America’s most prolific inventors.
Langers describes what a significant profession seems 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 greatest profession advice? Choose which means over cash. Langer was interviewed by 20 oil corporations at the starting of his profession, and was provided profitable jobs at every of them. He turned all of them down, took a job at a youngsters’s hospital, and went on to alter the future of 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 practically 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 with regards to careers. I imply, mainly what you need is any individual to have an awesome profession and be completely satisfied; and, , so my advice to college students is to don’t do what’s going to make you the most cash or the most safety, however do one thing that may make you content — no matter that’s.
Well once I received completed with graduate college, or once I was ending graduate college, this was the Seventies and there was this gasoline scarcity identical to just a few years in the past and the costs of gasoline saved 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 so much of job gives from oil corporations. And just about all my classmates went to grease corporations and labored there and so they received very high-paying jobs.
I did get 20 job interviews from these corporations, and I received 20 gives, too, however I wasn’t very enthusiastic about doing that. I bear in mind one interview the place they instructed me if I may simply improve the yield of this one petrochemical by .1 % that might be price billions of {dollars}, and I simply wasn’t enthusiastic about the affect that that might have, and I saved on the lookout for methods the place I assume I felt I may have extra of an affect on the world.
Well, let me give an instance of one factor we did. Actually, once I was a postdoctoral fellow with Judah Folkman one of the questions that we requested was: may molecules exist that might cease blood vessels from rising in the physique? So much of folks didn’t consider that that might occur, however my boss at the time, Dr. Folkman, did, and he employed me and we discovered that cartilage was in a position to block blood vessels. This was completed with Henry Brem as properly.
And then we discovered what — we needed to see if we may discover an extract. In different phrases, what are the actual substances that might cease blood vessels from rising that may exist. And properly there’s so much of issues — it’s important to break up the issues into totally different components. So first the place would possibly a molecule exist that might cease blood vessels?
The reply to that was probably cartilage, which doesn’t have blood vessels. Then it’s important to have a technique to research it, and that was very, very laborious 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 might launch these substances for a really, very very long time. So slightly 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 huge. And the molecules that we thought would cease blood vessels have been actually huge. So we needed to really then create methods to launch these molecules slowly although they have been huge, and launch them for months. And that was one thing folks by no means thought was doable. But I spent a number of years engaged on it, experimenting with totally different methods, and ultimately I discovered a technique to do it. And after we did that we revealed a paper in Nature exhibiting that for the first time you might launch molecules of any measurement from these little microparticles. And then we used that to create the bioassay and we remoted the first substances that might cease blood vessels from rising in the physique. Both of these discoveries, the polymer slow-rele…
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