Bob Langer
speaker
32 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Bob Langer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 2: Life and Death (Update) · 14 May 2025
podcast
To life-saving. I really believe that if we could do this, it would make a big difference in medicine. How to succeed at failing, part two, beginning now.
I failed over 200 times before I finally got something to work.
All this is a key element in the future of the NHS. One day, not too far away, you'll wonder how you live without it.
My name's Bob Langer, and I'm an institute professor at MIT. I do research, but I've also been involved in helping get companies started, and I've done various advising to the government, FDA, and places like that.
Well, I would say I'm a chemical engineer or a biomedical engineer, but people have called me all kinds of things. You know, they've called me a biochemist. We do very interdisciplinary work, so I end up getting called more than one thing. Do you care what people call you? I just like them to call me Bob.
Well, I mean, a lot of things, but I'd go back to my own career. I failed at trying to get research grants. My first nine research grants were turned down. I'd send them to places like National Institutes of Health, and they have study sections, reviewers.
Mine would go, just because of the work I was doing, to what was called a Pathology B study section, and they would review it, and they said, well, Dr. Langer, you know, he's an engineer. He doesn't know anything about biology or cancer. I failed over and over again. Other things, like I failed to get a job in a chemical engineering department as an assistant professor even. Nobody would hire me.
They said actually the opposite. They said, you know, chemical engineers don't do experimental biomedical engineering work. So, you know, they should work on oil or energy. When I first started working on creating these micro or nanoparticles to try to get large molecules to be delivered, I failed over 200 times. I mean, before I finally got something to work. I could go on and on in my failures.
What kept you going during all this failure? I really believed that if we could do this, it would make a big difference in science, and I hoped a big difference in medicine. Secondly, as I did some of it, you know, I could see some of these results with my own eyes.
When we were trying to deliver some of these molecules to stop blood vessel growth, I could see we were doing this double blind, but I could still see that we were stopping the vessels from growing. That's such a visual thing.
And I also developed these ways of studying delivery out of the little particles by putting certain enzymes in them and putting dyes in a little gel that would turn color if the enzymes came out. And I could see that happening. Like I said, the first 200 times or first 200 designs or more, it didn't happen.
But finally, I came up with a way where I'd see it come out after an hour, after two hours, after a day, after a second day, up to over 100 days in some cases. So I could see with my own eyes this was working. So that made an enormous difference to me, too.
The experiments I was doing weren't that expensive, especially the delivery ones initially because they were in test tubes. I worked probably 20-hour days. And so the expense wasn't that great. And I've always been good at manufacturing time.
Well, I think it's a great question, and I ultimately think it's a judgment call, and we can never be sure of our judgment. You like to try to think, are these things scientifically possible? I think that's one thing. Secondly, it's good to get advice from people. That doesn't mean you have to take it, but it's good to get advice.
I certainly personally have always erred on the side of, I guess, not quitting, and maybe that's sometimes a mistake. I don't think so. I think it depends on what could happen if you are successful. If you are successful, could it make a giant difference in the world? Could it help science a lot? Could it help patients' lives a lot? And so if you really feel that it can, you try that much harder.
If it's incremental, sure, then it's much easier to quit.
One, I guess I've always been very stubborn. My parents told me that. But secondly, I think there's a whole thing with role models, too. When I was a postdoc, the man that I worked with, Judah Folkman, he experienced the same thing. He had this theory that if you could stop blood vessels, you could stop cancer, and that was mediated by chemical signals.
And everyone told him he was wrong, but I would watch him every day, and he believed anything was possible. And he kept sticking to it. And of course, eventually he was right. I think seeing his example probably also had a big effect on me.
I think that's an interesting question. A lot of it even depends how you define failure. You know, when you're trying to learn about something, you try different things and embedded in the scientific papers we write, like when we wrote this paper in Nature in 1976, which was the first time you could get small particles to release large molecules from biocompatible materials.
Well, some of the materials we use failed. A lot of them did, actually, because they would either cause inflammation or the drug would come out way too fast or not come out at all. We found one fraction that worked and stopped blood vessels and probably 50 or 100 that didn't. So the failures and successes are maybe in the same papers sometimes. What I've tried to do, even to give more detail—
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