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THE EDISON OF MEDICINE

An Unusual Road to High-Impact

Research

IN THE EARLY 1970S, AS BOB LANGER was completing a PhD in chemical
engineering at MIT, the United States was rocked by the OPEC embargo and
the resulting oil crisis—making him a hot commodity in the eyes of oil and
chemical companies (he received 20 job offers in the field). An interview at
an Exxon operation in Baton Rouge prompted a seminal insight. “One of the
engineers said to me, ‘If you could just increase the yield of this one chemical
by point-one percent, that would be wonderful—that’s worth billions of dol-
lars,’” Langer recalls. “I remember flying back to Boston that night thinking,
‘Do I really want to spend my life doing this?’ ”
He applied to colleges for jobs developing chemistry curricula. When none
replied—“probably because as a chemical engineer, I wasn’t in the right
box”—he wrote to hospitals, “because I wanted to help people.” Again he
received no offers.
Then a colleague suggested that he contact Judah Folkman, a surgeon at
Boston Children’s Hospital who had a reputation for hiring unusual people.
Folkman had a controversial idea: that cancerous tumors emit chemical sig-
nals that stimulate angiogenesis, or the formation of new blood vessels. If the
signals could be blocked, Folkman theorized, tumors’ growth could be halted.
He hired Langer to isolate the first angiogenesis inhibitors. This involved iden-

exploring the mechanism that degrades the strain of virus used in the
vaccine, while the biomedical engineer was working on thermostabi-
lization. The two encountered a problem: Their data sets didn’t make
sense together. It turned out that they had run their experiments with
different concentrations of the vaccine: The engineer’s were those used
clinically, while the biologist’s were those called for by the analytical
methods of her field. The researchers had to align their experiments so
that they could compare results. Such issues are not uncommon. “The
challenge is to get people to talk the same language and also recognize
that for certain things, there’s no single expert,” Traverso says.
Even if there is no obvious need or fit for them, Langer often
brings in “superstars” who have unusual credentials. “You take a
chance on people,” he says. “Gio is a good example.” Traverso had
earned a PhD in molecular biology under Bert Vogelstein, a renowned
cancer biologist at Johns Hopkins; his doctoral research involved

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