Woa. When I read his current MIT department affiliations, I smelled a rat and I was right.
In 1988 some professors in the School of Science who were also administrators managed a totally ... irregular coup and killed off the Department of Applied Biological Sciences (formerly Food and Nutrition, Course 20), claiming the department including its professors were not of MIT quality. That's something that Visiting Committees judge (http://web.mit.edu/corporation/visiting.html), not self-interested professors who got envious that another department was getting way "too much" money all of a sudden, 10s of millions, that's when biotechnology was really taking off.
In essence, as part of this scam they tried to destroy Professor Langer ... but it turned out the Institute was in no position to slander and libel these professors, those remarks were quickly withdrawn, and homes were found for the tenured professors. Although as I heard just about everyone else was left in the lurch, e.g. a new professor, and the new grad students, one of whom was a roommate, were out of their positions, of course having turned down other offers. I wonder if Langer was able to keep his grad students ... that would have been tricky in many many ways, e.g. science and engineering graduate departments (and I hope others) have very tough qualification systems that are independent of research.
Anyway, he at least has the last laugh, has even been made one of the 11 current Institute Professors, who are essentially the very best of the very best.
And the professors who engineered that coup? I was told at the time they would never be given a position of trust in MIT Administration, and one notably went on to become the head of the CIA (I am not making this up), where he was both awful (this includes contemporary reports I heard from people under him at the time) and grossly violated Sensitive Compartmented Information (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Inform...), something that should have sent him to prison but of course resulted in nothing but a last day in office Presidential pardon.
Bob Langer is much more than just a drug delivery pioneer. He is the one that helped kick off the field of biomaterials. He helped discover novel materials for things like stents, skin implants, materials to grow cardiovascular cells on, etc.
In 1988 some professors in the School of Science who were also administrators managed a totally ... irregular coup and killed off the Department of Applied Biological Sciences (formerly Food and Nutrition, Course 20), claiming the department including its professors were not of MIT quality. That's something that Visiting Committees judge (http://web.mit.edu/corporation/visiting.html), not self-interested professors who got envious that another department was getting way "too much" money all of a sudden, 10s of millions, that's when biotechnology was really taking off.
In essence, as part of this scam they tried to destroy Professor Langer ... but it turned out the Institute was in no position to slander and libel these professors, those remarks were quickly withdrawn, and homes were found for the tenured professors. Although as I heard just about everyone else was left in the lurch, e.g. a new professor, and the new grad students, one of whom was a roommate, were out of their positions, of course having turned down other offers. I wonder if Langer was able to keep his grad students ... that would have been tricky in many many ways, e.g. science and engineering graduate departments (and I hope others) have very tough qualification systems that are independent of research.
Anyway, he at least has the last laugh, has even been made one of the 11 current Institute Professors, who are essentially the very best of the very best.
And the professors who engineered that coup? I was told at the time they would never be given a position of trust in MIT Administration, and one notably went on to become the head of the CIA (I am not making this up), where he was both awful (this includes contemporary reports I heard from people under him at the time) and grossly violated Sensitive Compartmented Information (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Inform...), something that should have sent him to prison but of course resulted in nothing but a last day in office Presidential pardon.