Science is not enough

On 17 November 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to Vannevar Bush, then Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, asking how the United States could continue to benefit from scientific progress once the war was over. Eight months later, Bush delivered his now iconic Science, the endless frontier report to President Harry S. Truman (Roosevelt had passed away three months earlier). In the report, Bush underscores the vital role of basic research in the natural and medical sciences for national prosperity and security, and he made a compelling case for sustained government funding.

In 1967, a collection of essays by Bush entitled Science is not enough was published. Written between 1945 and 1965, the essays reflect a key insight: while fundamental science is essential, it alone does not drive innovation. Bush proposed a model where science ignites innovation, but visionary entrepreneurship is the true engine of progress.

A textbook example of this model is Robert S. (Bob) Langer, who has been with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1977. Langer is a world-class scientist who transforms fundamental scientific knowledge into potentially groundbreaking innovations, and founds companies to bring those innovations to market. This is how science achieves real societal impact. It should be the core mission of every technical university, and MIT excels at it.

Hearing Bob Langer speak is enough to make you fall in love with him on the spot

Bob Langer has published over 1,600 scientific papers and holds more than 1,400 patents. He has co-founded around 40 biotech companies, including Moderna, which developed the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, and Momenta Pharmaceuticals, which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2020 for USD 6.5 billion. Langer is so legendary that Harvard Business School devoted a case study to him more than 20 years ago: The Langer Lab: Commercializing Science.

Hearing Bob Langer speak is enough to make you fall in love with him on the spot. In one of his lectures, he shares the following (paraphrased) story. “When I started as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School in 1974, I worked on polymers that could slowly release large molecules into the body. The scientific consensus was that this was impossible, but I didn’t know that. Like Edison, I tried hundreds of concepts, and I found at least 200 ways that didn’t work. Eventually, I discovered a method that released the active compound over a period of 100 days. It then took another 28 years before the first drug based on that principle reached the market.”

In 1871, Jacobus van ’t Hoff graduated in chemistry from the Polytechnic School in Delft (the predecessor of TU Delft). Thirty years later, he was the first-ever recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In his honour, TU Delft’s Process & Product Technology Institute (Pro2Tech) hosts the annual Van ’t Hoff Lecture: inspiring talks by eminent scientists. In 2017, Frances Arnold gave a lecture entitled Innovation by Evolution: Expanding the Enzyme Universe. A year later, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This year, the stage belongs to Bob Langer and Daniel Anderson, with a talk entitled Next-gen therapeutics: Where medicine meets engineering. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bob Langer is soon honoured with a Nobel Prize.