For more Comment, visit Columns
at www.sciencenews.org
Convergence solves problems that don’t fit in one field
Almost always, the way that this happened is
medical doctors, clinicians, when they wanted
to solve a medical problem, would go to their
house and find an object that somehow resembled the organ or tissue they wanted to fix and
they’d use it on a person.
So for example, in 1967 the clinicians at the
[National Institutes of Health] wanted to make
an artificial heart and they asked what object
kind of resembles a heart in their house, and
they thought of a lady’s girdle. And they picked
the material in a lady’s girdle to make the artificial heart out of. And actually, today, 43 years
later, that’s still what the artificial heart’s made
out of. But the artificial heart, as you know,
hasn’t worked very well. And the biggest reason
for that is when blood hits the surface of the
artificial heart, the lady’s girdle material, it forms a clot. The
clot goes to the patient’s brain, they get a stroke and they die.
But if you think about it, something designed to be a lady’s
girdle probably isn’t the best material to put in contact with
blood. And this problem pervades all of medicine. Dialysis
was sausage casing, vascular graft — that’s artificial blood
vessel — was a surgeon in Texas going to a clothes store to
see what he could sew well with. Breast implants: One was
a lubricant, another actually a mattress stuffing.
When I was a chemical engineer in the early ’70s, rather
than go into the oil industry — which almost all of my colleagues did — I actually worked with [medical researcher]
Judah Folkman. I went to a surgery lab and that’s where I
learned this. I saw that’s how all this would happen. So, some
of the things that we started thinking about were, could we
bring engineering … to solve these issues? What we started
thinking about was to ask from an engineering, chemistry
and biology standpoint, what do you really want? And then,
