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	For three decades, MIT professor Robert Langer has been seeing biomedical innovations where other scientists saw nothing at all.
Top doc: Robert Langer's credentials include undergraduate training at Cornell, a PhD at MIT, and a Harvard postdoc. In the last thirty years, he's been awarded more than 500 patents, plus the Draper and Lemelson-MIT prizes. But in the beginning, his work foundered, as higher-ups declined his grant applications and decided not to renew his first academic appointment.

In 1976, when he was a postdoc at Harvard, chemical engineer Robert Langer '70 was asked to give a talk to a distinguished group of polymer chemists in Michigan. The topic: his research on plastics that could be used to release molecules slowly, potentially aiding the study and treatment of cancer. Langer was nervous, so he rehearsed for two weeks-- practicing his twenty-minute talk into a tape recorder, again and again.When the talk was over, he thought it had gone pretty well. He was wrong. "They didn't believe anything I said," Langer recalls. "It went against conventional wisdom, went against what they'd learned and done. There was an enormous amount of skepticism."

After the talk, Langer wrote nine grant proposals in the hope of supporting his research; all were rejected, often with highly negative reviews. His academic job search foundered, and he wound up in the nutrition and food science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his graduate alma mater-- only to be told shortly thereafter that his three-year appointment wouldn't be renewed. "It was depressing, how badly received my research was," he says. "I was very discouraged, but I just kept plugging. You write papers, you give talks, you do more experiments to convince the skeptics."

Flash forward three decades. The lowly assistant professor who was nearly out of a job is now one of the country's bestknown scientists--holder of more than 500 patents, winner of such awards as the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize and the equally remunerative Draper Prize, engineering's answer to the Nobel. In May 2003, the Boston Globe put Langer on the cover of its Sunday magazine, under the headline THE SMARTEST MAN IN BOSTON. As if that weren't enough exposure, Langer's work has even been featured on the TV show "ER": a brain cancer treatment he helped develop was used to prolong the life of a beloved character. "Bob is the most brilliant researcher I've ever known, and I've known some pretty good ones," says Alexander Klibanov, a longtime colleague at MIT. "He's a visionary. He has the ability to identify truly important problems and then relentlessly go after them."

Langer's field--creating and manipulating polymers to improve human health--barely existed when he was a postdoc, hence the skepticism from his academic elders. The idea that a chemical engineer with no formal background in biology could develop medical treatments wasn't just novel--it was downright presumptuous. "When I started doing this in 1974," he says, "there were almost no engineers working in medicine." Back then, researchers adapted existing materials for medical purposes: ladies' girdle fabric was used in the first artificial heart and breast implants were filled with mattress stuffing.

The medical devices Langer envisioned--and would eventually design--were more "Star Trek" than "ER": implantable computer chips that release drugs in slow, controlled doses; artificial skin for the treatment of burn patients; lozenge-sized chemotherapy wafers implanted during brain tumor surgery; plastic scaffolds on which human tissues could be grown, potentially obviating the need for donor organs. "The thing about Bob is that he doesn't know any boundaries--when he gets to one, he figures out how to get over it or around it," says Michael Marletta, a former MIT colleague now at the University of California, Berkeley. "He brings a perspective that no one else seems to have, and he's done it time and time again. It's a combination of intellect, drive, and an ability to step back and see the big picture. I wouldn't be at all surprised, given the impact of his work at the interface of chemistry and engineering, that he would win a Nobel Prize."

The fruits of Langer's research are everywhere, from the nicotine patch to the stents implanted in cardiac patients.His chemotherapy wafers, developed with Dr. Henry Brem of Johns Hopkins, represented the first new brain cancer treatment in decades. His artificial skin has been approved by the FDA; artificial cartilage, bone, corneas, and blood vessels are in clinical trials; animal trials are being conducted on artificial spines and vocal cords. The latter has drawn the interest of actress Julie Andrews, who lost her singing voice after surgery to remove nodules on her vocal cords; she has visited MIT several times to raise awareness of the lab's research. "The future of biotechnology is enormous," says Langer, a slender man with curly salt-and-pepper hair. He's clad in a polo shirt and black jeans for a Monday at the office. "It's starting to change the world, and I think it'll change it even more."

Langer is a scientist with a businessman's savvy, known for his ability to connect academia and industry --to overcome the inherent suspicion the nonprofit world has for the for-profit one. In partnership with his colleagues and former students, Langer has founded more than a dozen companies, some of which have been sold to larger firms. He sees the collaborations as vital to his scientific mission, arguing that such considerations as regulatory compliance and clinical trials are the province of industry, not university professors. "Bob realized that concepts developed in academia could often only be implemented through rigorous development already in place in industry," says MIT health sciences and technology professor Elazer Edelman. "He recognized early on that there was great value in working hand in hand with industry to improve the quality of people's lives, and that industry was dedicated to the same goals as engineering and the physical sciences-- to make people's lives better, easier, healthier."

Langer insists that his corporate partnerships aren't driven by a profit motive. He cites the case of the brain cancer treatment, which he and Brem had licensed to Nova Pharmaceuticals --only to have the company taken over by Scios, which declined to develop it because the wafers would have a relatively small market of 14,000 patients. Langer was on the verge of litigation when a deal was struck: he and Brem slashed the licensing fees to which they were entitled, and a small Scios spin-off company brought it to market. "The royalties are next to nothing," Langer says. "But we don't care, because we wanted these things to get out and help patients."

At fifty-six, Langer estimates that he works sixty to seventy hours a week, though those who know him say his mind is always on. They call him a parallel processor, a non-linear thinker, an inveterate multi-tasker. "He watches two TVs at once, checks his e-mail, and talks to someone else on the phone," says former Langer postdoc David Putnam, now a biomedical engineering professor at Cornell. "He can do multiple things at once, and do them well." Langer is famous for answering his messages almost instantly, regardless of where he is on the globe. Says Klibanov: "We have a joke here at MIT that if he hasn't returned a phone call or an e-mail message within ten minutes, something may have happened to him."

But the scientist does take time out for a daily run. He met his wife, Laura, while jogging on a track at MIT. She holds a PhD in neuroscience, though she presently stays home with their three children, aged ten to fourteen--and, as Langer puts it, "organizes our lives."Among his few hobbies is a longtime interest in magic, especially card tricks and sleight-of-hand. "There are two kinds of magic," he says. "Stage magic is something you do far away-- sawing the girl in half is really just a good prop. I like close-up magic, something I could do right in front of you."

Langer grew up in Albany, New York, the son of a liquor store owner and a homemaker. (His father, a navigator in World War II, held a BA from Union College and did master's work in English at Harvard. "He was a really smart, intellectual kind of guy," Langer says, "probably more than I am.") As a child he was no prodigy, though he was partial to his Gilbert chemistry set, and he went off to college with no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. "In high school, the only things I was good at were math and science, and the guidance counselor told me I ought to become an engineer," Langer recalled in his acceptance speech for the 2002 Draper Prize. "At that point, however, I thought that engineers ran railroad cars, and I wasn't really clear why math and science were going to help me so much with that."

During his first semester at Cornell, Langer managed only a B-minus average. But eventually he did well in the rigorous chemical engineering program, which had recently been switched from a five-year curriculum to four. The schedule--he had five 8 a.m. classes his junior year, including one on Saturdays--didn't leave much room for a social life. After graduation he was attracted by the intellectual diversity of MIT's chemical engineering program, earning a PhD in four years; his dissertation analyzed enzymatic regeneration of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a nucleotide that transports energy to cells for biochemical processes. "When I got done, most of the chemical engineers went to the oil industry," he says. "I remember going to Exxon in Baton Rouge for an interview, and the guy said, ‘If we can increase the yield of oil by point-one percent, that's worth billions. Isn't that wonderful?' I remember flying back on the plane and thinking, ‘I don't want to do that.' I wanted to do something important with my life, something that would have an impact, but I didn't know what it was."

The newly minted PhD had always had a social conscience; as a grad student, he'd helped found a high school for poor children in Cambridge, running the math and science departments. In 1974, he began a postdoc with Dr. Judah Folkman, a professor of surgery at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Folkman had pioneered the then-controversial theory of angiogenesis: the concept that cancerous tumors were fueled by blood vessels, and that by choking off that blood supply the tumors could be killed. It was under Folkman's tutelage that the young scientist began developing polymer systems for the slow release of molecules in cancer study and treatment. But because many of the molecules were large or had significant electrical charges, conventional wisdom said such a system was impossible. And though Langer made promising discoveries, the scientific community gave his work a decidedly cool reception--as in the 1976 Michigan lecture. But eventually other researchers in academia and the pharmaceutical industry began to replicate Langer's results; rather than showing him the door, MIT gave him a promotion."Most of the world's scientists work on problems that are not that important--they're minor little things," Klibanov says. "Even if they're wildly successful, they will not change the world. Bob has this drive to formulate really, truly important problems, then pursue them."

His focus on big-picture issues has drawn a great deal of press over the years. He got some of his biggest headlines in the late 1990s when a photo of a human ear growing out of a mouse's back hit the mainstream media. The much-downloaded picture showed the bizarre results of a tissue-engineering experiment. Some pundits took it as a harbinger of a brave new world--and late-night comics had a field day. As Langer told Forbes in a 2002 interview: "The publicity wasn't so great. But the science behind it, that was fine."

To the lay visitor, the Langer Lab doesn't look any different from hundreds of facilities like it all over the country. Located on the third floor of an MIT health sciences building, the lab comprises several large rooms filled with workbenches, expensive instruments, umpteen glass vessels, blaring rock music, and a cadre of smart, intense people in their twenties and thirties. "Our lab," says Ying Chau '95, a fifth-year PhD student in chemical engineering, "is very crowded and messy."

In one corner, a PhD student in materials science uses MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) in a tissue engineering project, creating flexible, implantable materials for possible vascular applications. Nearby, a postdoctoral chemical engineer works on spinal cord regeneration and a Berkeley educated PhD in materials science tinkers with the "pharmacy on a chip" technology Langer pioneered, studying its chemotherapy value in treating tumors in rats. In another room, a chemical engineer creates "DNA vaccines," in which DNA is injected into immune cells as a potential preventive for viral infections such as influenza and HIV; down the aisle, a colleague searches for ways to alleviate chronic pain through long-term local anesthesia. Chau, a Hong Kong native who studied agricultural and biological engineering on the Hill, is studying ways to target cancerous tumors with an existing chemotherapy drug.

"It was very interdisciplinary within the lab," David Putnam recalls. "There were polymer chemists, physical chemists, biochemists, geneticists, engineers. If you had a question, you could walk down the hall, knock on a door, and have a conversation. And if you weren't able to solve the problem, there was a network within Boston--someone knew someone who could collaborate on a project. And if you couldn't solve the problem that way, Bob would give you a list of five people and say ‘Call them,' and you'd be done."

Langer fosters camaraderie within the sixty-person lab with weekly seminars, receptions for departing members, an annual beach party at his family's vacation home on Cape Cod, and a lab softball team. (He's the designated hitter.) Students describe him as an ideal mentor: one who offers guidance without micro-managing or stifling creativity. "Working with Bob is like watching a maestro conduct," says Edelman, who became Langer's second graduate student after attending a 1978 talk he gave on polymeric drug delivery systems. "He has this incredible ability to see the beauty and grace in everything, from a work of art to a work of science--an ability to create synthesis and harmony by leading large groups of people, and for each of them to feel like he's providing the highest degree of individual attention."

Every year, Langer gets some 2,000 applications for a handful of postdoc openings. And in an increasingly brutal academic job market, having the Langer Lab on one's résumé is something of a gold standard. "The number of people he has trained who are full professors or department chairs or presidents of major companies is astonishing," Edelman says. "I don't think anyone matches that. He has changed the way in which science is performed, by training so many people who have such profound influence in academia and industry."

Edelman likes to tell a story about how Langer, invited to speak at the 350th anniversary of the University of Helsinki, insisted on sending him instead. "He could've gone to this very prestigious talk," Edelman recalls, "but he thought of me at a time when I was nothing, and promoted me in a way that was a real honor." Edelman gave the lecture to hundreds of dignitaries in a centuries-old auditorium; afterward, dozens of people wanted to speak with him--but not about his talk. "Everybody who came down asked me to give regards to Bob Langer, and each of them told me he was their best friend," Edelman recalls with a laugh. "Each of them told me how he'd helped them get a job, helped their company, helped them with some personal thing. Every single one had their own story about how Bob had had an impact on them, and they felt this burning need to let him know they were thinking of him."

The point, Edelman says, is that Langer isn't just a worldclass scientist; he's also a nice guy. It's a recurring theme among his colleagues and students: the genius is a mensch. "There are some people who succeed in spite of their personalities," says longtime colleague Mike Shuler, the Eckert professor of chemical engineering at Cornell. "Bob is not one of those. He's genuinely interested in people, in trying to be helpful. He's by nature a generous person."

His colleagues also reiterate the obvious: Langer is a very, very smart guy. "Bob thinks differently from everybody else," says Edelman. "Some people simply read a letter or a syllable at a time, other people read words at a time, and there are some people who can read phrases at a time. Bob sees the page as an image. He's like a grandmaster chess player who sees not how individual pieces move but what the board is going to look like at the end of the game. Then he transforms the pieces at every specific point to get where he wants to be."

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