Dr Robert Langer

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is the scientist Dr. Robert Langer, pioneer, teacher, entrepreneur, inventor. He's in the what-if business, asking the big questions on how to tackle and treat disease and injury. An entirely credible estimate says two billion people's lives have been affected by the work he's done. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, burns, and spinal injuries are just a few of the areas to benefit significantly from his remarkable dedication to discovery. The most cited engineer in history, the lab he runs at MIT, isn't just a petri dish for ideas and innovations, it's also grown a generation of world-class biochemists devoting their time and energy to making us healthier and happier. As a child in school, he had problems paying attention in class, but down in the basement of the family home, his dad, who owned a liquor store, would help him rig up experiments with his little chemistry set, and so began a fascination with science. He says, when you're a student, you're judged by how well you answer questions, but in life, you're judged by how good your questions are. And so, Robert Langer, welcome. This idea of always wondering, what if we just you know, your brain surely must constantly be mulling over the possibilities of what life and what science holds. What's the question currently at the forefront of this great brain?

Dr Robert Langer1:57

Well, I guess there are quite a few questions we're asking in our laboratory. I mean, what we're doing is work at the interface of engineering and materials and medicine. So some of them are: can we create new therapies using nanotechnology? You could take a hair out, and if you looked at the thickness of a hair, a nanoparticle might be, you know, one-thousandth that thickness. So they're very, very tiny materials. Part of what we're doing is trying to use nanotechnology to deliver, say, a cancer drug. Or there may someday, I think, in the next 20 years be new medicines that'll enable us to change the genetic makeup of a cell to, say, if somebody has an enzyme deficiency disease, that we might be able to help them on that.

Presenter2:42

Now, you have, I think it would be fair to say, received almost every available plaudit and award going for your work. You're one of very few to have received the US National Medal of Technology and Innovation and also the US Medal of Science. Then, last year, here in the UK, you were awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, only the second time it's been awarded, for what was described in the citation as your revolutionary leadership at the interface of chemistry and medicine. Such a good phrase. What is it that excites you about that interface?

Dr Robert Langer3:15

What excites me is I think both that there's important scientific challenges, but that solving those scientific challenges can do a lot of good. I mean, just to give an example or two, one of the things that we're working on in the lab is an area we call tissue engineering or regenerative medicine. So someday, you know, we might be able to combine materials and cells to create virtually any new tissue or organ. And already that can lead to new skin for burn victims. But we've also done work in terms of new treatments for diabetes, for hearing loss, for many other problems.

Presenter3:48

There must surely be a vast amount of not just knowledge, but also discipline involved in your work. How much of your time I'm guessing now not in the lab do you spend dreaming about possibilities, you know? Do you sit on a park bench and let your mind wander?

Dr Robert Langer4:03

Well, you know, it's a it's a really interesting question. You know, I don't dream deliberately, you know, but every so often that you you're listening to music or you're watching a T V show and, you know, thoughts just come to you.

Presenter4:14

Um, you have said that the key to solving big problems is ensuring that you and your team have got, in your words, the freedom to explore. How do you create that culture?

Dr Robert Langer4:24

you need a number of things. I mean, first, you have to have a reasonable amount of funding. But I think most of it's attitude, that people feel that there are no limits to what they can do and that they're doing something really important.

Presenter4:37

We're here to chat to you, Bob Langer, but also to hear your music. Tell me about the first one this morning. What is it, and why have you chosen it?

Dr Robert Langer4:43

Well, when I was a little boy, you know, probably about five, six years old, Walt Disney had this movie about Davy Crockett and I really loved it and I liked the song. You know, I remember singing it all the time and I still like it today.

Speaker 14:58

Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, Green estate in the land of the free Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree Kilt him a bar when he was only three Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier

Speaker 15:15

In eighteen thirteen the Creeks uprose, Addin' redskin eras to the country's woes.

Speaker 15:22

Now, engine fighting is something he knows, so he shoulders his rifle and off he goes. Davey!

Presenter5:30

The ballad of Davy Crockett, sung there by Fez Parker, composed by George Burns and Tom Blackburn, and they were calling him the Buckskin Buccaneer. Is there something of the buccaneering spirit in your signs? Do you enjoy, Bob Langer, going places that other people haven't and doing it in a way that other people don't?

Dr Robert Langer5:47

You know, I don't know that I enjoy doing that, but I think I do do it. When I was a graduate student, I was a chemical engineer. When I got done, almost all of my colleagues went to oil companies. And so I applied to those companies. I actually got 20 job offers from Exxon alone. They were saying, well, you know, if you could just increase the yield of maybe this one petrochemical by a very small amount, that would be wonderful, be worth billions. But I wasn't excited about it. And so I started to think about other things that I might do.

Presenter6:21

And so here you are now, running what must be the biggest bioengineering lab in academia, I imagine. Among the many successes in your work is this thing that you mentioned a moment ago.

Presenter6:30

Tissue regeneration. Particularly, I want to ask you about this idea of growing new skin for Burns survivors. Can you explain a little bit about how it's done? I've seen the pictures, and it looks extraordinary.

Dr Robert Langer6:43

The central idea, and it's now been modified different ways, is that you could take a plastic scaffold and you could take different cell types. And in the case of artificial skin, what's called the fibroblast cell. And when you put it on

Dr Robert Langer6:59

plastic, it grows and you can actually uh put that on a burn victim and or or a person who is say diabetic skin ulcers and make uh new skin.

Presenter7:08

I mentioned in introducing you to day this almost bamboozling figure of two billion individual people who have in some way been touched by the innovations and inventions that you have been responsible for.

Presenter7:25

Is it possible for you to look at a particular area, or indeed a very particular drug or therapy, and think, So far, that's my proudest moment. My team did that.

Dr Robert Langer7:37

Well, I think if I were to pick one scientific area, I would think of the discovery we made that did go against conventional wisdom, where we discovered how you could use materials to deliver molecules over long times where those molecules would have really any charge or any size. And I think that opened the door to a lot of new therapies.

Presenter8:01

Could you give me a little example?

Dr Robert Langer8:01

Yeah.

Dr Robert Langer8:03

Sure. So there are now microspheres that people inject. Say, somebody has prostate cancer, advanced prostate cancer. They're drugs that they're big molecules like certain types of hormones, and you can't swallow them, you can't take them by almost any route. And if you inject them normally, they're destroyed right away. But now you can put them in little microspheres and they'll protect the drug from harm, and they'll deliver it initially over a month. Now they actually have some that last for six months. And there are many different medications like that.

Presenter8:03

Sure.

Presenter8:34

And those microspheres that you developed, they just enable, rather than before where that drug would be automatically attacked by somebody's system, they are released slowly and predictably and in a way that benefits the body rather than harming it.

Dr Robert Langer8:46

That's correct. I mean, what you said is exactly right. The drug is also protected and the drug is also released at a steady rate so that you don't get side effects.

Presenter8:56

You've been responsible for I I read different figures. I I read two dozen startups, but I think it's more than that now. One of them particularly caught my eye. I I was reading that there was a link between research that you did into prostate and ovarian cancer that eventually led to a company that makes hair products. They're advertised by Jennifer Anniston. Have I got the link right? Can that possibly be true?

Dr Robert Langer9:17

It's a little bit of a long story, but the science we do in our lab, one of the big areas that Dan Anderson, who was one of my postdocs, he's now a professor at MIT, and I did, is create new ways to make materials. We made literally thousands and thousands of materials with the idea that some might be useful as a gene therapy for prostate or ovarian cancer. So we had this library. But since we had those materials, you could use them for anything. And another one of my former students and some of his colleagues wanted to start a company on hair care. And so one of the questions they asked is, could we help prevent frizz? Could we help give hair more body? And again, you can reach into that library and find materials that can do just about anything. So we did. I mean, anything we can do that makes people healthier or happier is good. And my feeling is even the hair products actually make a lot of people happy, and I think that's a good thing, too.

Speaker 19:37

So we

Presenter10:08

Some more music, Bob Langer. Tell me about this second one. What are we going to hear?

Dr Robert Langer10:12

Well, when I was uh just starting high school, I remember there was a debate about whether the best song was going to be Blue Moon or Runaway. And I remember listening to Runaway and I thought it was a great song.

Speaker 410:23

As I walk along I wondered what went wrong with our love, although I've got so strong.

Speaker 410:36

And as I still walk on, I think of things we've done together while our hearts were young.

Speaker 410:49

I'm a walking in the rain Tears of Puzzle

Presenter10:55

That was Del Shannon and Runaway and memories for you, uh Bob Langer, of those days in school where you took part in the school vote. Let's look a little bit earlier, I'm guessing it wouldn't have been your teenage years. You were given these little I said chemistry uh sets, but actually little building sets, all all sorts of

Dr Robert Langer11:11

Covered all the sciences. Those were erector yeah, so there were ere erector sets were the building sets. Microscope sets, chemistry sets. They I they don't exist anymore, but they were people by age. They certainly in the US they probably had them.

Presenter11:11

Tells you a r

Presenter11:22

And people would know they have now that very retro look of usually it would be a little boy on the front, you know, and coloured ink and him doing his experiments, and you were one of those little boys doing the experiments. Uh tell me what you made with them.

Dr Robert Langer11:34

Well, with the erector set, I remember they had like a rocket launcher. You could shoot, you know, I mean, it wasn't like a real rocket. It was a rocket you could shoot in the house. I think my mother would be ready to kill me. You know, they had this thing called the parachute jump, and then there was like this big robot that was like the ultimate thing you could make. But, you know, you could make almost anything. With the microscope set, you know, I think the big experiment I remember was watching shrimp eggs hatch. And with the chemistry set, I mean, to me, I've always liked magic. And I mean, the things that I remember were like mixing, you know, two different solutions together, different colors, and they'd react and you'd see a third color. Or you could make rubber, you know, by adding two things together.

Presenter12:14

Do you perform magic?

Dr Robert Langer12:16

I did. I haven't done it in a while, but when my kids were younger and I was younger, I I performed some shows. I don't think I'm the greatest magician, but I was I was halfway decent. You can go to magic shops or do card tricks and you could fool a lot of people.

Presenter12:29

Scientists, of course, have to be surely comfortable with failure. When you're a little boy, you're thinking, It says in the instructions, if I mix that and I mix that, then this'll happen, and it didn't. Can can you remember any of your sort of disappointments and failures?

Dr Robert Langer12:42

Yeah. I remember my friends and I had this idea that we were going to make gunpowder and uh we failed on that just about every time, probably fortunately. But yes, I I've had a lot of failures and everything.

Presenter12:53

And and paying attention in class. I saw you say in an interview once I wasn't very good at that and I think I might have had ADHD. Did you not think you were maybe just b

Presenter13:02

Bored.

Dr Robert Langer13:04

I probably was bored. And actually, sometimes I even now, you know, I go to lectures and I have trouble concentrating and I daydream and I I I think that's just who I am. If I have a one-on-one conversation, I'm pretty good. But if I'm sitting like in a lecture hall and somebody's speaking, even if they're very, very good, it's hard for me to concentrate past the first few minutes and I just daydream about different things. And that's what I did when I was little.

Presenter13:27

In your case, I think it might be reasonably categorized as just being smarter than everybody else. Tell me about your third piece. Tell me about your third piece of music. What are we going to hear now, and why have you chosen this?

Dr Robert Langer13:32

Yeah.

Dr Robert Langer13:37

Well, the next one actually fir first it's a theme song from a movie that I that I enjoy and always felt was very underrated, Legends of the Fall. But I also thought it was just a a a great story about conflict and and resolution.

Presenter14:20

That was Legends of the Fall, played by the London Symphony Orchestra, composed and conducted by James Horner. So, Bob Langer, tell me a little bit about your father. He got a master's degree at Harvard.

Presenter14:32

But yet, after the war, there he is ending up running his own. He was a small businessman, he ran a a liquor store.

Dr Robert Langer14:37

He did. My dad uh grew up in the Depression and I think he got to see people who were very successful, you know, go bankrupt and get very poor. Then he went into World War Two and f he was a navigator, uh fought over Italy.

Dr Robert Langer14:54

And when he got done actually he started with one of his friends that ran a pool hall in Troy, New York. And I remember as a little boy crawling under the tables of that pool hall. But most of what he did after the pool hall was run a you know, he owned a small liquor store in Albany and he worked very hard.

Presenter15:12

A d

Dr Robert Langer15:12

Do you think opportunities were

Presenter15:13

And open to him?

Dr Robert Langer15:15

I think that he was really concerned about providing a secure.

Dr Robert Langer15:21

living for his family, you know, my sis sister and I and and and my mom, that there was enough money that we would have a house over our heads and that uh we would have a decent life.

Presenter15:31

And within this decent life, then, what was his expectation of how his son and indeed his daughter would do in school?

Dr Robert Langer15:37

My parents were great that way. They just wanted me to be happy. So I think they were pleased that I did okay or did reasonably well in school, but it wasn't something that they emphasized.

Presenter15:47

And so your mother is still alive. She's ninety three now.

Dr Robert Langer15:50

Yeah, she just turned ninety three a couple of weeks ago.

Presenter15:52

And as a kid, what are your strongest memories of her as a young mum?

Dr Robert Langer15:57

Well, my mom was then and is is now, you know, a very nice person. I mean, she would just take care of my sister and I. I guess my sister and I would fight some and she would, you know, probably s try to stop us from fighting. But uh she's just like a a very loving person.

Presenter16:12

And you've also said that she tended to be a warrior.

Dr Robert Langer16:15

That is for sure. I mean, there are a lot of memories of that, but like one of the things that my parents decided when I think I was twelve and my sister was ten that we should go to overnight camp. And the overnight camp we went to was probably about an hour and a half away. And so we'd drive up and I would say every minute, maybe less, she would come up with another worry. Well, what do you do if it rains? I said, Well, mom, we'll wear rubbers. Well, but what if you can't find your rubbers? And and my sister and I we were so frustrated, you know, we'd start counting the worries, like eighty-five, eighty-six, but it wouldn't matter. I mean, she would keep coming up with more of them. And she still, you know, worries a lot today. That's just who she is. She worries about everybody, her herself, me, my kids. It that doesn't matter, but she's very good at worrying.

Presenter16:59

Everything that I have read about you and and people say about you is that you are one of those people who sees solutions where nobody else does. And I'm wondering when that began. You know, as were you a creative kid? Were you somebody early on who was figuring out the world?

Dr Robert Langer17:17

You know, I really don't think I was very special in any way as a kid. I I mean, when I look back at my childhood, I think it was pretty normal. I played sports with my friends. I was a good student. I don't think I was a great student. But in terms of figuring out the world,

Dr Robert Langer17:33

I I don't think I did anything special then either.

Presenter17:36

You weren't a great student, you say. What results did you come out of high school with?

Dr Robert Langer17:40

I was in the top ten percent of my class, but I wasn't I wasn't num number one in my class if I had any age.

Presenter17:41

Yeah.

Presenter17:45

Top ten percent. It's pretty good, Bob. Tell me what we're going to hear next, then we're on your fourth.

Dr Robert Langer17:50

Yeah. Well, the next song I mean, one of the things that I loved was being a teacher, you know, working with young people and getting them excited about math and science. It's always been something I loved. One movie that I always loved was Desert With Love. So I I loved that song.

Speaker 418:05

The time has come.

Speaker 418:10

For closing books and long-lasting looks must stay

Speaker 418:21

As I meet, I know that I am leaving my best friend.

Presenter18:34

That was to Sir with Love. It was Lulu that was singing it. It's on your list, Bob Langer, for many good reasons that you explained to us. But during it, we were having a fascinating conversation, and I surely must share it with listeners. You said, Is Lulu still singing? I said, Yes, she is. And you said, You know, the artificial tissue research that we've been doing and the work that we've been doing, we do on singers too. And Julie Andrews famously has had problems with her vocal cords, which she's spoken about. Also Adele more recently. Explain a little bit of this artificial tissue work when it comes to singers at that level.

Dr Robert Langer19:04

One of my colleagues and friends is a man named Steve Zeitels, and he's a voice surgeon. And what happens sometimes to some singers is they get a lot of scar tissue on their vocal cords. So one of the things that Steve had asked me to do is to see if we could someday make a gel that might be able to help those singers. So we hope that it'll be ready to try in patients at some point in the near future.

Presenter19:29

So Adele, if you're listening, it's all going to be fine. And let me ask you then let me ask you then about when you began to teach, it was while you yourself were still studying, and you got a taste for teaching because you were involved in a very particular community project. Explain a little bit of that to me.

Dr Robert Langer19:32

He thinks he's doing okay.

Dr Robert Langer19:47

The first time I did get a taste of teaching was at Cornell. I was a teaching assistant as an undergraduate, and I loved that. But then I went to MIT as a graduate school, and that was in Cambridge and Boston. Cambridge, Massachusetts has Harvard and MIT, but in the 1970s it had the highest high school dropout rate of any city its size in the United States. So we got involved in starting the school for students that had dropped out of the conventional high schools. And in particular, what I was doing was trying to create better math and science programs. And one of the ways the school looked at it and the students looked at it is that you didn't have to take math or science. So that was a good challenge. And my goal was to really make it exciting and interesting, to try to come up with ways that people could see chemical phenomena, but in things that they could relate to. Like as an example, there's something called freezing point lowering. One way that we actually can do that is by making ice cream. And the way you make ice cream is you actually can take a liquid, but if you can put salt into where you're making it, you can actually lower it. And that's actually part of how you make ice cream. So you can use a lot of everyday principles.

Presenter20:55

Let's go to more music then, Bob Langer. We're on your fifth. Tell me about this. Why have you chosen it?

Dr Robert Langer21:00

Well, I've always liked sports, and I've also always liked Root for the U underdog. I often, I guess, think of myself that way sometimes, but my favorite sports movie is a movie called Hoosiers, and I always loved the music from it.

Presenter21:45

That was best shot, composed and performed by Jerry Goldsmith from the film Who's Ears? You said, Bob Langer, I've always rooted for the underdog and I I sort of think I think of myself as a bit of an underdog. Why why do you think of yourself in that way? I'm fascinated.

Dr Robert Langer21:59

Well, I I struggled, you know, a lot at different points in my life. And while I was doing m my post doctor work, I was doing it as in in a surgery department at uh Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School with Judith Hochmann.

Dr Robert Langer22:13

And I made some discoveries and inventions at the time, but the research I'd done kind of went against what I'll call conventional wisdom. It challenged a lot of ways of thinking that people had. So, what happened was a lot of people were very much against the ideas that I had, and so my first nine grants, which is important when you're an academic, were rejected. And then also, I didn't get any job in a chemical engineering department. I went to what was it called the nutrition department.

Dr Robert Langer22:44

And there, when I was talking about some of my ideas on drug delivery systems, one of the senior faculty just sat there and he blew smoke in my face and he said, You better start looking for another job.

Presenter22:56

Because this was sort of the beginnings of the biochemical and biomedical engineering. And you worked, you mentioned there, Judah Fultman at Harvard, you worked on this thing to do with, it was to do with tumours. And if you could restrict the blood supply to tumours, then you could stop the tumour growing, and therefore people wouldn't have to deal with such severe cancers. And you were pretty much maybe not mocked quite, but people looked at the work you've been doing and they looked down your nose at it. And there were you as somebody who had turned down, you came out with a very good degree, you had turned down.

Speaker 423:17

Yeah.

Speaker 123:17

Black

Presenter23:25

20 jobs at big oil companies. And I'm wondering.

Presenter23:29

I'm thinking about your father, who only thought you know, he ran a liquor store when he had a degree from Harvard. He only thought about provision and doing the right thing for his family. You you seemed to be cut from a different cloth. You didn't seem to have that where you seemed to have the fire in your belly to to keep going.

Speaker 123:35

Right.

Speaker 123:38

Yeah.

Dr Robert Langer23:38

Update.

Dr Robert Langer23:46

I think he was afraid that he couldn't provide necessarily a livelihood for us, but he did, you know, so I had that security, so I could take chances. I wasn't thinking about money. You know, it was like, what did I love doing? You know, and that was what my dad would always say to me: he said, pick a job, you know, not because of location, not because of anything else other than that you really love it. And actually, I like that message. That's the message I tell my students, too.

Presenter24:13

You've been married to Laura and I for a long time. How did you meet the woman who would become your wife?

Dr Robert Langer24:17

While she was a graduate student at MIT, she was a roommate of one of the people who worked in our lab.

Presenter24:22

A neuroscientist.

Dr Robert Langer24:23

Yeah, she's a neuroscientist, yeah. And and uh I guess one day we were running on the track and and we started talking to each other and uh kind of things led from there.

Presenter24:24

Yeah.

Presenter24:33

Uh she's very attractive. How did the shy guy manage to work up the nerve to talk to the gorgeous girl on the right?

Dr Robert Langer24:39

I think she'cause she she she's a lot more outgoing than I am, so she talked to me.

Presenter24:44

Let's have the music then, Bob Langer. Wha what are we going to hear?

Dr Robert Langer24:47

So this is a song that w they played at our wedding. It was from Dirty Dancing, which is another movie that I liked and she liked, and it's the best time of my life.

Speaker 424:57

Not three miles.

Speaker 425:03

Thank you.

Speaker 425:07

So I'll tell you something.

Speaker 425:12

It's nothing hard.

Speaker 425:14

Because

Speaker 425:16

Ah

Speaker 425:19

Have all my love.

Speaker 425:22

Everything is waiting for the signs where

Presenter25:30

That was the time of my life, sung by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warrens from the movie Dirty Dancing. Your father, uh, Bob Langer, was only sixty one when he died. Am I right in thinking that you decided to sort of change your lifestyle in terms of exercise and other things when your father died? You were around about twenty eight when that happened.

Dr Robert Langer25:47

I did. I I changed a number of things because of that. I used to love steak and hamburgers. Those were my two favorite uh foods. And I gave up red meat probably forty years ago, and then I would do a lot of exercise every day.

Presenter26:02

How much?

Dr Robert Langer26:03

Oh, two to three hours, maybe two to four hours even.

Dr Robert Langer26:06

But I actually work a lot of when I'm exercising. You know, I I ha we have a like a recumbent bike and that means you can sit down on it and, you know, read and write.

Presenter26:14

You fit in the parenting you've had three kids amid this extraordinarily busy professional life.

Dr Robert Langer26:19

Yeah, so my wife is very clear, very outspoken, and she said, Well, I know you're gonna wanna work and stuff like that, but I want you home by seven o'clock every night so you can spend time with the kids And I'm really glad she did, but also every year I take uh each of my children on a special trip with me. I did that ever since they were little and all of them got to go to see Queen Elizabeth when I won the Queen Elizabeth Prize last year.

Presenter26:41

And you spent a lot of time as a family relatively. You were there with the royal family, the close royal family, for a couple of hours.

Dr Robert Langer26:47

Yeah, they they were great. I mean, there were six members of the royal family there. Talking science? Well, some of them did, actually. You know, uh Princess Anne seemed to know quite a bit of science.

Presenter26:51

Talking song

Presenter26:57

Let us talk a little bit more science then. And one of your major scientific breakthroughs is creating a way of delivering medicine specifically and then using remote control to activate this medicine. And explain a little bit of that.

Dr Robert Langer27:13

Yes, so you know about close to 20 years ago I was watching a TV show on how they made chips in the computer industry and I thought to myself, you know, just sort of flashed through my mind, boy, what if we could put drugs in chips and activate those chips, you know, remotely to deliver things whenever and wherever we wanted. Just to give you one example of, and this is a variation of that chip that we're doing, is one of the things that people sometimes talk about today in medicine is what's called personalized medicine. Could you come up with the right drugs for the right patient? Let's say they have cancer. They might actually take some of the cancer cells out of the body, grow them in like a Petri dish or something like that, and see what chemicals, what chemotherapy agents work best. And then they might give that to the patient. But one of the issues with that, even though it's a good idea, is you don't have the immune system in the Petri dish. You don't have blood vessels in the Petri dish. So we're actually making little chips now in the form of a very, very tiny cylinder. So you can take a biopsy needle, put one of those cylinders in it with maybe 30 to 100 different chemotherapy drugs. Then you come back a day later.

Speaker 127:43

Could you

Dr Robert Langer28:21

And you take with a slightly larger needle, you remove the needle you just put in and a little bit of the surrounding tissue. And you analyze that surrounding tissue and it tells you which of those 30 or 100 drugs actually works best on the patient. And there you have everything, the immune system, the matrix, and so forth. And so the idea, and we're just starting clinical trials now, is could you really come up with personalized medicine by using that? Because we'd actually have a device like that where we could test in a patient. In other words, when you create a new technology like that kind of chip, it opens the door to all kinds of things. It's like a sort of almost a new tool that I hope will enable science and medicine to go further because of it.

Presenter29:01

With our minds suitably blown, Bob Langer, we will listen to your next piece of music. Tell me about this. We're on your seventh.

Dr Robert Langer29:08

Well, I have to admit, I probably cheated a little bit. I asked my wife and my children my son said, you know, well, probably if if you're thinking about us, you should play uh wannabe from the Spice Girls. So uh this is about what they were little'cause they wanted a lot of things.

Speaker 429:22

If you want my future, forget my past.

Speaker 429:26

If you wanna get with me, better make it fast. Now don't go wasting my precious time. Get your act together, we could be just fine. I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Don't tell me what you want, what you really, really want. I wanna really, really, really wanna take a take. If you wanna be my lover.

Speaker 129:48

If you are

Presenter29:48

I'm gonna be

Speaker 129:49

My

Speaker 429:50

You gotta get with my friends Making lots for

Presenter29:54

For your three kids, Bob Langer, that was the Spice Girls and Wannabe. You've had an unparalleled amount of success in your field. When you talk to students around the world, what do you pass on to them about pursuing a life in science?

Dr Robert Langer30:09

Whether it's science or anything, the message that I try to impart is that you want to first do something you love, and I think it's worth spending time to find out what that is. And then I also think it's wonderful to have dreams and to dream big. But I think that at the same time you have to recognize that you're going to run into, just like I did, just like probably everybody does, obstacles. Obstacles that may make those dreams seem like they're so far away and may never happen. And so the last message that I give is don't ever give up.

Presenter30:38

People who work with you say that um you don't have

Presenter30:42

a linear way of thinking. You know, you take great leaps of thought.

Presenter30:47

You can't teach that, can you? Do do you think somebody just either has that or they don't?

Dr Robert Langer30:52

For me, I don't know that you can teach it, but I think you can help it. The way I I often look at it is is this. I've never thought I was anything special in most ways, but I had a degree in chemical engineering, so I knew chemical engineering pretty well.

Dr Robert Langer31:06

And then what I did is I ended up doing for my postdoc something totally different that really stretched me, which was being really the only engineer in a surgery department, in a hospital. And it exposed me to very, very different things. So I was able to combine engineering on the one hand with medicine on the other. So if you learn two very disparate things, whatever those two things are, you might think of unusual ways to combine them. And that may aid in your creativity.

Presenter31:33

Bob Langer, it's just as well you are an inventor and a problem solver, because, as you know, we cast you away to a desert island all on your own.

Presenter31:42

It won't prove too much of a problem for you. Will it you'll immediately be figuring the whole thing out, I'm sure. What do you think?

Dr Robert Langer31:47

I don't I don't think so. I think my wife would say that I would probably have a hard time I'm a very good chemical engineer, but I'm probably not good at figuring out practical things.

Presenter31:56

Tell me about your eighth disc, then.

Dr Robert Langer31:58

Well, here I I guess I think about uh again my wife Laura, and yeah, I just feel so lucky that uh she's been in my life and really helped me in so many ways with my family and and my career. So my last song I thought about uh The Wind Beneath My Wings by Bette Midler.

Speaker 432:15

Did you ever know that you're my hero?

Speaker 432:23

Everything I would like to be

Speaker 432:34

Ego.

Speaker 432:39

You are the win beneath my wings.

Presenter32:45

That was Bette Middler singing The Wind Beneath My Wings, and you dedicated that, Bob, to your wife, Laura. It's time now for me to give you the books. We give everybody the complete works of Shakespeare and a copy of the Bible, and they get to take another book along with those What's Your Book gonna be?

Dr Robert Langer33:00

So I guess I was trying to think between the Iliad and the Odyssey, so I guess I'll pick the Iliad.

Presenter33:05

Good lot of reading in that, and a luxury too.

Dr Robert Langer33:09

I'd want to have a picture of my family or a photo album of my family.

Presenter33:12

Oh yeah, we can give you a whole album of Family Snap.

Dr Robert Langer33:14

Okay, that would be great.

Presenter33:16

And if the waves were to threaten to wash away these disks, which one single disc, Bob, would you run through the sand to save?

Dr Robert Langer33:24

I probably would do the wind beneath my wings.

Presenter33:27

Okay, it's yours, Dr. Bob Langer. Thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Dr Robert Langer33:31

Well, thank you. It's been wonderful.

Presenter34:14

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.