Guest Editorial: Prologue (2013)

On January 1st, I was at home and the phone rang. It was Professor Dan Schectman. He informed me that I had been selected to receive the 2013 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. I was shocked for many reasons, not the least of which was that no engineer had received this Prize before. It also made me think back to the early days of my career. I was so fortunate that after receiving my doctorate in chemical engineering in 1974, Judah Folkman (who would receive the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 1992) offered me a position in his lab at the Boston Children′s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I was also the only engineer working in his lab, if not the entire hospital. He asked me if I could isolate what would become the first angiogenesis inhibitor.1 To do so, it was essential to develop bioassays to determine if such inhibitors existed, and since these bioassays took a long time and the angiogenesis inhibitors were macromolecules, I had to invent a way to create non inflammatory controlled release systems for such molecules.2 Later when I became a Professor at MIT, our lab conducted numerous fundamental studies to elaborate the mechanism of release from such polymer systems,3 developed what I hope are new paradigms for creating biomedical polymers4 and, with Henry Brem (Neurosurgeon-in-Chief, Johns Hopkins Medical School), developed the concept of localized chemotherapy (originally used in brain cancer5) with such polymers, isolated novel enzymes that would someday enable complex polysaccharide sequencing,6 developed novel nanoparticles7 and, with Jay Vacanti (John Homans Professor of Surgery, Harvard Medical School), developed principles that would enable the ability to engineer new tissues.8 I believe some of these contributions were responsible for my receiving the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Harvey Prize and the Dan David Prize in Materials Science as well as for my receiving honorary doctorates from such Israeli universities as the Technion, Hebrew University, Ben-Gurion University and Tel Aviv University. I′ve also been so incredibly fortunate to have had so many wonderful students and postdocs; over 240 are now professors, many in Israel. It′s really they who are responsible for this research. The Wolf Prize ceremony was wonderful. It was both humbling and such an honor to be in the company of current and past recipients of the Prize, as well as to meet President Shimon Peres (see Figure 1). 2013 Wolf Prize ceremony in the Chagall Hall in the Knesset Assembly Hall. Pictured (l to r): Robert S. Langer, Meir Sheetrit, Shimon Peres, and Shai Piron. The tapestry in the background depicts Jerusalem as the focus of the Jewish experience and its history, created by Marc Chagall in 1965–68. On May 7th, two days after the Wolf Prize ceremony, Ehud Keinan organized a wonderful symposium on new biomaterials that many of my former students, postdocs and colleagues participated in at Ben-Gurion University. This issue of Israel Journal of Chemistry, edited by my former postdoc, Shulamit Levenberg, flows from that symposium. I am very grateful to Ehud, Shulamit, and everyone who wrote these excellent articles for making the symposium and this issue possible. This was certainly one of the most memorable and most gratifying experiences in my life. Robert S. Langer Massachusetts Institute of Technology