Soft tissue engineering in biomedical materials

Tom's 1995 strategic hire after meeting with Doug Lauffenburger. Now a third of the materials department. Example of MIT setting national field direction.

Anyway, when I became department head, I thought, I don't need another hip corroder. They've been doing that for 30 years. So I met with Doug Lauffenburger, who's now head of the department of biomedical engineering, which we didn't have at the time. He had just come from Illinois, and we went to lunch, and I said, what's interesting? By a biomedical engineer, I don't just want someone who looks at corrosion of metals in the human body. We've started that for years. And he started telling me about soft tissue engineering, and I decided I wanted to hire a soft tissue engineer as our biomedical engineer. It was not a traditional area of materials science anywhere in the country. The faculty in the department fought me for two years. I would bring in people who were in that area from other departments — not the materials science department. "Where are you bringing this person in for a faculty interview?" I said, look, you have an interview on the fringes of the department; you don't just want to clone what you've already got. We had that debate. Now biomedical engineering is a third of the department. Within two or three years after we hired our first couple of people — this is 17, 18 years ago — other departments in the country in materials science said, oh, MIT did that, we should do that. I could go through other examples, but what we do influences other people.