So, last month, I had the opportunity to visit the House of Sweden (the building that houses the Swedish Embassy in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC).  It’s a stunning building with vistas of the Lincoln and Washington Monuments, the Kennedy Center, the infamous Watergate Hotel and Residences, Rosslyn (VA), and Roosevelt Island.

As I approached the embassy, I was startled (pleasantly) to see a new sculpture (at least to me), abutting the House of Sweden, on the property of the famous Georgetown eatery, the Sequoia Restaurant.  The piece is entitled ‘Scarlet Natural Chaos’, a 41 foot tall metal technicolor piece. The artist, Arne Quinze (from Belgium),  is known for creating controversial art. (He does create sculpture for the Burning Man Festival, too.)

Why was I visiting the Swedish Embassy?  Because the MIT Club of DC was holding its annual meeting.  No, that’s not really why I was attending.  I was going there because Dr. Susan Hockfield, who served as the (sixteenth) President of MIT from 2004 to 2012 was delivering a speech.

Susan was an amazing choice as MIT president- since MIT is the temple of engineering, and Dr. Hockfield is a neurobiologist.  (By the way, she is still associated with MIT and a member of the Koch [yes, them] Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.)  It fell to Dr. Hockfield to position MIT (known as the ‘tute) for the future.  And, she performed marvelously- followed by Dr. L. Rafael Reif as her successor, ensuring that interdisciplinary, multi-faceted research and instructional paths became the norm.  (Boy, that would have been fantastic back when I went there.  Instead of having my idea of working in various disciplines being regarded as “outside the scope of MIT education”, “Perhaps, I should consider a career in marketing”, or “Focus, Roy, focus”.)

Officially, she was going to discuss the material from her new book, The Age of Living Machines.   I admit it- I didn’t read her book. No, I listened to the audiobook version- which was great (for biotech nerds like me, who have no problem with the concepts and terminology).

Dr. H’s premise is that 100 years ago, the world was changed because physicists were able to uncover the building blocks of atoms.  And, that knowledge enabled engineers to create a confluence of engineering and physics concepts to yield radar, telephones, nuclear power, GPS, and the internet (among many other radical changes).

And, when Dr. H arrived at MIT in 2004 (having been a biologist at Yale), she was astonished to find out that about 1/3 of the engineers there had already incorporated biology in their research!

With the mapping of the Human Genome (the Human Genome Project, a 13 year,  $3 billion project that completed in 2013), we were able to uncover the building blocks of cells and life.  (DNA was mapped using the technology developed by the confluence of physics and engineering; but more information was necessary to make that development more fully useful).

The book describes a brave new world.  Protein based filters that will purify water.  Nanoparticles that will render cancer harmless.  Bionic limbs, connected to our brains, which means they will be controlled by our thoughts.  Genetically engineered crops.  These (and similar) developments will enable us to meet the demands of the 21^st century living.

Dr. H introduced her talk explaining that this would be one of her easier ones.  Because it’s an MIT story – and we (her audience) already has the vernacular and experience to better understand the concepts.

Most of us nerds know that engineers and scientist speak different languages.  (I use the term vernaculars.)  To compound that problem, each discipline has different problem approaches.  (I learned this years ago in a wonderful management of engineers course taught to me by Professor Gibson.  Back when engineers sported string ties as part of their costume.  He lumped all the engineers into one box- but reminded us that ChemE’s don’t fit in that mold.  He told us that they were confused- whether they were engineers of scientists, approaching problems differently and using different vernacular.)

Which is why MIT is proud of the Koch Institute- where scientists and engineers are housed in one building.  Where they have to interact.  And, that is contiguous to both the Whitehead and Broad Institutes, other multidisciplinary programs of MIT.  Plus , there’s the Bridge Project which brings together clinicians and researchers from Dana Farber, Mass General, Brigham and Women’s, Beth Israel Deaconess, Harvard Med and MIT.

Dr. H. didn’t come with a slew of slides.  But, the ones she shared with us were cogent demonstrations of the changes that have been occurring.  Like the one shown above.  Demonstrating that as dramatic as our improvements in computer chips has been (Moore’s Law), our ability to sequence and produce new genomes (the genetic material contained in a cell or structure) has caused the costs to drop even more precipitously.  Obviously, this means the biological age, at such lowered costs, is eminently achievable.

Susan also mentioned that Sangeeta Bhatia (PhD, MD) has found a way to employ nanoparticles to detect cancer.  “So what?”, you ask.  Well, we detect cancers nowadays when they are pretty late; they’ve grown to a significant extent- which makes treatment harder.  Dr. Bhatia’s process is based on knowledge about the cancer’s actions that lets us detect cancers earlier. Perhaps before they’ve even taken hold.  (Dr. H. asserted that 30% of cancers are preventable; I have not researched this statistic.  But, I think that’s based upon whether we really will change our diet, forgo tobacco, etc.   That’s a great concept, but…)

We have learned that cancerous cells produce enzymes that cut up the extracellular space, that lets those cells migrate to invade other cells. But, Bhatia developed phage-derived nanoparticles to target specific peptides.  The proteins that are formed  are small enough to be filtered through our kidneys and excreted in our urine.  Those biomarkers are thus detected much earlier in the cancerous growth stages, rendering treatment more effective.

Dr. H then went to our need to deal with climate change, which means we need to develop alternative energy sources.  However, the rate-limiting step in adopting alternative energy is not the energy sources themselves- but energy storage.  Solar power is great when the sun shines.  But, that’s not constant.  Likewise, wind power.  What do we do on calm days?   We need to find a way to store energy.  (Note: For some locales, the Dominion Energy concept of building a reservoir atop a mountain works [where we our power plant provides 70 to 50% of peak demand all the time, and fill the reservoir at night, when energy demand is lower, and during the day, we let the water cascade downhill, collecting the hydropower to meet the peak demands]- is great, but it can’t be uniformly copied across the US.]

Which brings up the research of Angela Belcher, PhD.   Belcher has elected to mimic what the abalones do, using the M13 virus.  The M13 virus is a bacteriophage (only attacks bacteria, in this case the common microbe, Escherichia coli [E coli]), with a single-strand of DNA, comprised of about 2700 copies of P8, a coat protein.  She has manipulated the virus to produce anodes, cathodes, and processes to organize them into batteries (in particular, to the circular type batteries common in our watches and hearing aids), without producing toxic byproducts.

The last case Susan brought up was NOT from MIT.  Dr. Peter Agre (Johns Hopkins) managed to discover a unique material, aquaporin.  As is true for many scientific discoveries (serendipity- the discovery of something unexpected or by accident, recognized by the scientific mind as useful and, therefore, not discarded), he was seeking to identify the protein that creates the problem with RH babies (where the embryo has the RH factor and the mom doesn’t- so the mom’s antibodies attack fetal red blood cells)- and kept finding this material in his collections.   It turns out (here’s another scientific development) that despite the common belief that cellular water transport was not associated with a specific gate protein, there is one.  And, that’s aquaporin [so names by Agre].   And, Agre and Aquaporin A/S are building water purification systems based upon the action of this protein- which means the energy demands to purify water are dramatically lowered, which will help the bulk of the world’s population, since we are running short of fresh (and potable) water.

All of these examples make it clear that multidisciplinary research, incorporating the tools of biology to engineer the world’s solutions is the way to go.  Except…

That’s not the way the government thinks.  And, while government sponsorship of research has dropped from 2% of GDP at it’s heyday (this reduction began during the Reagan revolution to strip social benefits from federal spending, devoting more to military and not to improving the lives of Americans- and cutting taxes to make it harder to reverse this trend) down to a miserable 0.6% today.  (Government needs to sponsor basic research, which is too risky for corporate treasuries; business uses that knowledge to develop new products.  The graph below shows how the Koch Institute has created a slew of new biotechnology ventures.)

Which means that the MIT programs must rely on private donations and foundations.  (I was lucky enough to be funded by a Sloan Foundation grant for multidisciplinary research [we chose kidney ailments and therapies as our target, the researchers were ChemE, Systems, Mechanical, and Electrical engineers] almost 50 years ago.  One of the first of such grants that slowly disappeared over the years.)

The critical issue is that basic research, by its nature, is inefficient.  But, it’s the only route to discovery, innovation, and technological development.

And, Susan ended her talk with a warning, one that portends poorly on continued American success. China is about to outspend the USA on research as a percentage of GDP.

Actually, as of today, it has already done so.

 

By the way- today is Flag Day.  The Continental Congress adopted our first flag on 14 June 1777, 232 years ago.  Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it in 1916; Congress made it official in 1949.

Oh, the Army claims today as it’s day, too.