Something new

The first artificial hearts were made of girdle elastic. Dialysis tubing was first fashioned from sausage casing, and breast implants were once padded with mattress stuffing. All of these were novel, homemade solutions to a medical need, according to Robert Langer, an MIT professor and chemical engineer who spoke Thursday evening at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. It was that kind of thinking—using materials on hand because technology was lagging—that inspired much of Langer's work on drug delivery systems. Drugs that couldn't effectively be given by injection or by mouth could be imbedded in a polymer from which they would ebb slowly, over days, weeks, months, or even years. His latest research uses polymers as a framework on which to place specific types of cell to grow cartilage. Picture a kind of topiary frame on which nose cells can multiply, but the topiary mesh melts away once the nose is formed. Exciting stuff; work that helped win him the 2008 Millennium Technology Prize.

I look at my own writing life, in which to create characters and scenes and stories I draw on what I have on hand—my own experiences—but take them to the next level. Like the topiary for noses, my experiences become the framework on which to build, to create, something new.