00:00:00 America was built on innovation.

00:00:18 From our nation's founders to our early industrialists to today's medical and technological pioneers,

00:00:25 we are a culture of inventors and innovators.

00:00:30 To carry on the spirit of American ingenuity, we must encourage our young people to discover

00:00:36 the excitement and rewards of science, engineering, and entrepreneurship, and equip them with the

00:00:42 tools for discovery and creation.

00:00:47 The Lemelson-MIT Awards program was launched in 1994 to cultivate America's next inventors,

00:00:55 innovators, and entrepreneurs.

00:00:58 Established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology through a generous gift from

00:01:03 the late independent inventor Jerome Lemelson and his wife, Dorothy, the awards program

00:01:10 is part of a national initiative sponsored by the Lemelson Foundation to promote invention

00:01:15 and innovation in the United States.

00:01:20 Founded by economist Professor Lester Thoreau, the awards program pays tribute to our country's

00:01:26 outstanding contemporary inventors.

00:01:29 Each year it presents the half-million-dollar Lemelson-MIT Prize, the world's largest award

00:01:35 for invention, the Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award, and the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student

00:01:42 Prize.

00:01:44 The awards program also conducts ongoing educational outreach through its Invention Ambassador

00:01:50 Program, Student Mentor Invention Teams, and its Invention Dimension website, the online

00:01:57 clearinghouse for information on inventors, their inventions, and the inventing process.

00:02:06 America's greatest glories and its future successes are products of the ingenuity that

00:02:11 has defined our culture and country.

00:02:14 The Lemelson-MIT awards program carries on this tradition by celebrating the innovators

00:02:20 of today and shaping the inventors of tomorrow.

00:02:24 Good evening, and welcome to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

00:02:42 We are very pleased to host the fourth annual Lemelson-MIT Awards Ceremony, particularly

00:02:48 this year in special tribute to one of the most prolific inventors in our nation's history,

00:02:54 Jerome Lemelson, who we all will miss dearly.

00:02:59 We are fortunate to have known Jerry Lemelson and to have glimpsed his extraordinary creative

00:03:04 abilities.

00:03:05 We are fortunate, too, that he and his wife, Dorothy, had the vision to establish the Lemelson

00:03:11 National Program in Invention, Innovation, and Creativity several years ago.

00:03:18 Through activities such as the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program, the Lemelson Center here at

00:03:23 the National Museum of American History, and those based at Hampshire College and the University

00:03:28 of Nevada, Reno, a new generation of Americans will be inspired to become the inventors,

00:03:35 scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs of the 21st century.

00:03:40 The Lemelson National Program has fostered valuable partnerships, and tonight's events

00:03:46 highlight just one of these.

00:03:48 We have always admired MIT's commitment to fostering the spirit and development of technological

00:03:54 innovation and welcome this opportunity to join them in celebrating America's inventors

00:04:00 and innovators.

00:04:02 So it is with great pleasure that I would like to introduce the President of MIT, Charles

00:04:08 Vest.

00:04:09 Thank you, Dr. Crewe, and good evening.

00:04:22 Each year since 1995, we have gathered here in this magnificent museum to honor the spirit

00:04:29 of American innovation through the presentation of the Lemelson-MIT Awards.

00:04:36 It is, as it should be, a time of joy and celebration, a time to recognize the transforming

00:04:43 power of innovation in American life, and a time to recognize the enduring value of

00:04:50 the inventors, the visionaries, who have made extraordinary contributions to human knowledge,

00:04:56 and health, and the quality of human life.

00:05:00 In establishing these awards, Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson were sending a clear message to our

00:05:06 society that we must celebrate and reward the risk-takers and innovators whose ingenuity

00:05:13 has led to the products, processes, and industries that invigorate our economy and society.

00:05:21 We all know how athletes, musicians, and actors have captured the imagination and adulation

00:05:27 of our young people.

00:05:30 Think what we could achieve if the younger generation were to be equally inspired by

00:05:34 our inventors.

00:05:35 Frankly, it is not an easy sell in today's mass culture.

00:05:40 Still, it is increasingly clear that this program is another of Jerry Lemelson's good

00:05:47 ideas.

00:05:49 He understood that a major national award program could draw public attention to the

00:05:54 serious and valuable work of America's inventors and innovators.

00:06:00 And so it has.

00:06:02 Today the message and the mission of the Lemelson-MIT awards are beginning to make their mark in

00:06:08 the wider culture.

00:06:10 And increasingly, leaders in industry, government, and academia are paying attention to a fact

00:06:16 that Jerry knew all along.

00:06:18 That this nation's competitive position in the world marketplace rests squarely on our

00:06:24 ability to invent and innovate.

00:06:28 We have seen the fruits of invention benefit our economy, our health, our standard of living

00:06:33 in countless ways.

00:06:35 It was Jerry's dream to take this lesson and make it more visible to the broader public,

00:06:41 and especially more appealing to the young people of our country.

00:06:48 The Lemelson-MIT awards program was designed to do just that, to honor those whose creativity

00:06:54 and inventiveness have made significant contributions to our well-being, and in so doing, to encourage

00:07:01 the younger generation to follow suit.

00:07:04 We are deeply grateful to Jerry, Dolly, and their family for having the wisdom and generosity

00:07:12 to turn that dream into reality.

00:07:16 Our first presentation of the evening is the award for Lifetime Achievement.

00:07:22 Our presenter will be Dr. Lester Thurow, who holds the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson professorship

00:07:28 at MIT's Sloan School of Management.

00:07:32 Professor Thurow has served as the chairman of the Lemelson-MIT prize board since the

00:07:37 program's inception in 1994.

00:07:41 Please join me in welcoming Professor Lester Thurow.

00:07:53 The idea of our Lifetime Achievement Award was to make something a little different than

00:07:57 our Inventor Award, because you remember that the concept was here that we need inventors

00:08:04 and innovators, and an innovator is somebody who either makes the invention themselves,

00:08:09 or takes that invention and makes it into a practical, everyday device that we use in

00:08:13 our common life, and in some sense, this has been the American genius.

00:08:18 People have gone back and looked at the world in the 15th century, the 1400s, and if you

00:08:23 look at the 1400s, you could probably make the argument that China was ahead in science,

00:08:28 and China was ahead in basic inventions, but what they never had the capability of doing

00:08:33 was taking that science and taking that invention and making it into practical, everyday devices

00:08:39 that created the Industrial Revolution and created our standard of living.

00:08:43 And so the idea of the Lifetime Achievement Award is to emphasize somebody that literally

00:08:48 has a lifetime of being an innovator in bringing things to the market, creating jobs, changing

00:08:54 the way we live, raising standards of living.

00:08:57 And tonight, we have somebody who is incredibly symbolic of that goal, Jacob Rabinow.

00:09:05 We now have video on our Lifetime Achievement Award winner.

00:09:09 To Jacob Rabinow, it's creativity that drives invention, a process that he considers an

00:09:18 art form with little or nothing to do with logic.

00:09:22 The really breakthroughs are unexpected.

00:09:25 They come out from random combinations of things that nobody ever combined before, and

00:09:31 this means that it is very much like writing a poem, composing a piece of music, or doing

00:09:37 anything else which is new, different, and unexpected.

00:09:40 By the way, it could be unexpected to invent it as much as it could be unexpected and surprising

00:09:45 to society.

00:09:46 His artful engineering has yielded 229 patents, covering a diverse range of technology.

00:09:52 In weaponry, safety fuses for rocket bombs.

00:09:56 In the home, a novel turntable design.

00:09:59 On the road, magnetic clutches and self-regulating clocks.

00:10:03 In the post office, automatic letter sorters.

00:10:07 In banking, check reading machines.

00:10:10 In photography, innovative enlargers.

00:10:13 And in computers, the world's first magnetic disk memory.

00:10:17 Jack, as he is known to friends, regards all of these as personal statements.

00:10:22 What drives a person to play tournament tennis?

00:10:25 What drives a person to lower his golf score or solve a chess match?

00:10:30 It's a thing that you're good at and you'd like to be better at it.

00:10:35 It's a, I guess the right way to say it, it's an ego trip.

00:10:38 It's a way of testing yourself.

00:10:42 For Rabinov, the testing began in an extraordinary childhood he describes as too eventful.

00:10:48 Born Jacob Rabinovich in 1910, he and his family lived in European Russia and Siberia

00:10:54 for his first nine years.

00:10:56 Fleeing the revolution, they moved to China where more calamity awaited.

00:11:01 Typhus claimed his father's life.

00:11:04 His mother immigrated to America with Jack and his brother David and opened up a modest

00:11:08 corset shop in Brooklyn.

00:11:11 They were so poor for the first two years that they lived in an apartment with no hot

00:11:15 water, no bathtub, and no toilet.

00:11:19 With this humble background, Jack was led to believe that he had no apparent future

00:11:24 when he emerged from New York's City College in the 1930s.

00:11:27 I was told that the Jewish engineer is a contradiction of terms, that you cannot get a job in engineering

00:11:35 with a degree, but I thought since the depression was on at the time, I'm going to starve anyway

00:11:40 and I decided I'd rather starve as an engineer than starve as anything else.

00:11:44 He went to work for the government in what was then called the Bureau of Standards, where

00:11:49 he spent most of his career, with a very successful detour in the 50s and 60s at his own firm,

00:11:55 Rabino Engineering.

00:11:56 There, he refused to do defense work in fear that the inflated prices would make him careless,

00:12:03 and he set up a flat management structure that was considered radical at the time.

00:12:08 I had everybody in one large room, including my own office in the front, so that all the

00:12:13 people could watch me and come in and drop in and talk to me and I could watch everybody

00:12:18 work because I didn't believe that one should have many layers of authority.

00:12:24 Rabino believes invention can be taught, provided the process begins in early childhood.

00:12:30 When I watched great tennis players play, I noticed a lot of them play two-handed, that

00:12:34 is, they learned tennis when they were too little to hold the racket with one hand.

00:12:39 And I think that what we need is to teach people the science and mathematics also when

00:12:44 they're very young.

00:12:45 And what we need really is two-handed mathematicians, two-handed scientists, two-handed inventors.

00:12:52 He suggests an upside-down approach to creativity, that is, doing the opposite of the norm, or

00:12:59 the 606 method, meaning that there may be 605 attempts before the real solution comes

00:13:05 to life.

00:13:07 Rabino believes that people can start inventing at any age, as long as the environment is

00:13:12 right.

00:13:13 The culture has to love the subject, to be interested in it, and they have to be willing

00:13:17 to support the kind of teachers that teach it.

00:13:20 For example, the Italians love opera.

00:13:23 They get great opera singers and they get good opera.

00:13:27 The Europeans love to play soccer, they have great soccer players.

00:13:31 South America has great soccer players.

00:13:33 We love basketball, we have great basketball players.

00:13:36 If we love science as much as we love basketball, we'd have some very much greater, maybe I

00:13:43 should say taller inventors, not only two-handed, but seven-foot inventors.

00:14:06 I should say this year that we have a new trophy designed by our residents at MIT, Arthur

00:14:21 Ganson.

00:14:22 And if you change it, it says the MIT Lemelson Inventor Innovator Award, and for Jacob, fabulous.

00:14:34 I've played with this for the last two days, and it proved to me that something that I

00:14:43 read many years ago, that inventors never grow up, they remain children to the time

00:14:49 of their death.

00:14:50 It's quite a gadget.

00:14:52 Anyway, having been an inventor for some 80 years, I think you'll forgive me if I talk

00:14:57 a little bit what invention is to me and what I think inventors are.

00:15:03 I think invention is an art form.

00:15:05 Incidentally, I can't see any of your faces, but I hope you don't mind.

00:15:10 I think invention is an art form, it should be supported as such, and I think it's produced

00:15:16 by a random process.

00:15:17 Individual inventions are produced by a kind of random process in a mind of a single individual.

00:15:23 You have stories today that we do it by groups.

00:15:25 I don't believe it.

00:15:27 The development is by groups, the invention is in mind.

00:15:30 I would like to tell you what it takes to be an inventor of a good invention.

00:15:35 You do a lot of trivial stuff because you make a living, but the good inventions come

00:15:40 because an inventor has three qualities.

00:15:42 First, he has to have a large database.

00:15:45 This is modern slang for means he has to know a lot.

00:15:49 Then he has to have the desire to combine things in that his head is in his head, concepts,

00:15:56 insights, music notes, words, and produce something that he himself hasn't expected,

00:16:02 and there's no way of knowing whether the result will be different from what has been

00:16:06 done before, whether it's good or whether it's trash.

00:16:10 You have to produce a lot of trash to produce a few good things.

00:16:14 I know people disagree, but I think this is true of all creative people.

00:16:18 Also, they not just have the chutzpah to think that he can do something that nobody else

00:16:23 has ever done, but he can do it better than anybody else.

00:16:26 Finally, and the third thing is very difficult, he has to be able to judge what he had done

00:16:31 and decide that this is wheat and this is chaff, and if he's very good, he gets rid

00:16:35 of the chaff so fast that you never hear of it.

00:16:39 He's not so good, and he thinks he has a great invention and this is a common disease, and

00:16:44 if it has to do with energy, he sends it to us at the National Bureau of Standards and

00:16:48 Technology, and we evaluate it for him, and usually we reject it.

00:16:53 Out of some 30,000 such inventions, we have approved some 700 for grants from the government

00:17:01 and the rest was thrown out.

00:17:02 By the way, this has been run under the management of George Lewitt, who I think is here tonight.

00:17:09 I can't see him, I can't see anything here.

00:17:12 The Chinese, according to Dr. Thoreau, the Chinese failed years ago because they didn't

00:17:18 invent glasses, so they became blind very early.

00:17:21 I have a trifocals on, and I still can't see you.

00:17:26 So we evaluate this thing, and I can tell you that having worked with some 30,000 inventions,

00:17:34 I don't remember a single inventor who ever thanked us because we told them the truth,

00:17:40 because one of the troubles of being an inventor, you think you're clever.

00:17:45 I listened, watched the tape, and there are things I would like to say, but it said it

00:17:50 over there, and it's the first time in my life where I'm preempted by myself.

00:17:58 So I think we need two-headed inventors.

00:18:01 Gladys and I were watching, Gladys, who is my wife, so most of you know that, or some

00:18:06 of you know it.

00:18:07 We watched the Hollywood Ways of Honoring People, and that was a few weeks ago, whenever

00:18:16 it was, and I was very interested, of course, because they also gave a Lifetime Achievement

00:18:21 Award to an aging member of the profession.

00:18:25 I decided that the guy did really deserve the honor, but the business about aging, I

00:18:30 decided, had nothing to do with me.

00:18:36 The thing that they do normally, of course, they call the name of, say, a male actor

00:18:40 who did a very good job.

00:18:42 The camera immediately focuses on him as if the cameraman knows who it is, but that's

00:18:47 just cynicism.

00:18:48 He, of course, being a good actor, immediately looks very surprised.

00:18:52 He gets up, kisses everybody, runs in the stage, gets behind a microphone, reaches in

00:18:57 his pocket, and he just happens to have a long list of people he has to thank.

00:19:03 I don't have a long list, and when Dr. Thoreau called me, I really didn't ... I was surprised.

00:19:09 I didn't know I was being considered.

00:19:12 I'd like to give a few thanks.

00:19:14 First of all, I'm very grateful to Jerry and Dorothy Lemelson for honoring me and for MIT,

00:19:21 of course.

00:19:23 The second thing is I think that establishing an award system such as this means that the

00:19:31 Lemelsons have joined a long and distinguished list of people who are patrons of the various

00:19:38 arts.

00:19:40 It happens that today, as you heard Dr. Vest say, the basic problem of being ahead of the

00:19:47 world in technology is very serious.

00:19:49 I think we're slipping.

00:19:51 Only in the fields of computers and programming are we way ahead, but in most things, we're

00:19:59 way behind.

00:20:00 I challenge anybody who was taking pictures of me yesterday in New York to give me a name

00:20:05 of a camera they had that was not made in Japan.

00:20:09 This is true for engines.

00:20:11 This is true for automobiles.

00:20:12 This is true for a lot of machinery.

00:20:15 I feel this is very important, of course, because that's my job, but I feel that supporting

00:20:22 innovation as the Lemelson, MIT people, this museum and the other museums of the Smithsonian

00:20:30 and Hampshire College and the College of Nevada, as what they're doing is very, very important.

00:20:36 I think that the inventors of the United States, I'm sure I'm speaking for all of them, and

00:20:42 that's also Chutzpah, but forgive me.

00:20:44 I think all of the Lemelsons are great, many big thanks, more than I could do.

00:20:50 I would like now to do a little more thanking, which I think I have a right to do.

00:20:55 I'm very grateful that in 1921, this country permitted a small family of three, my mother,

00:21:02 my brother, myself, to come here and settle.

00:21:08 My mother made enough ... Also, it's very nice that my mother was able to make a living

00:21:13 so that my brother and I could exist reasonably comfortably.

00:21:17 We did live in a home without heat, without plumbing, and without facilities.

00:21:22 That's a short time ago.

00:21:23 I lived in Siberia where the facilities were outside.

00:21:27 When I lectured at Berkeley, one of the students said, who needs more invention?

00:21:31 Who needs more materialism?

00:21:32 Why don't we just devote ourselves to beautiful things?

00:21:35 I said, before you tell me what to do, I suggest you go to live in Siberia for a while with

00:21:40 the outside toilets at minus 40 degrees.

00:21:44 He, being a wise guy, said, Fahrenheit or centigrade?

00:21:46 I said, if you're well educated, it happens that 40 Fahrenheit also is minus 40 centigrade.

00:21:59 I said, and the two thermometer scales cross at your backside.

00:22:04 Anyway, I'm very glad that my mother was able to make a living and see to it that her two

00:22:11 sons got to college.

00:22:13 She did this by making courses for fat ladies, and sometimes I say I take my engineering

00:22:18 from her.

00:22:21 I'm also grateful to New York City for having enough such non-slender ladies to keep my

00:22:28 mother busy.

00:22:30 Well, this is no joke when you're poor.

00:22:35 I also thank New York City for giving me a wonderful education free.

00:22:39 I went to public school, high school, and eventually to the great city college.

00:22:45 My brother went to Cooper Union in Cornell.

00:22:49 They were not free, but he was a scholarship student.

00:22:51 He's here tonight, and he got his education a little more than free.

00:22:58 I thank New York City for another thing.

00:23:01 They made sure that I could not become a high school teacher.

00:23:05 What happened is that depression was on.

00:23:08 I took the necessary courses, passed the necessary written exams, and as soon as I opened my

00:23:13 mouth to speak, they said, you have a foreign accent, and they very cheerfully and promptly

00:23:18 flunked me.

00:23:22 Some of my friends weren't so lucky.

00:23:24 They were born here.

00:23:25 They passed the exam, and eventually became, I was going to say teachers.

00:23:31 That's not correct.

00:23:32 They became lion tamers in New York high schools.

00:23:36 I also am very grateful to the civil service system and the Bureau of Standards for appointing

00:23:41 me as a mechanical engineer in Washington in 1938.

00:23:46 My degrees are in electrical engineering.

00:23:48 I have two degrees, but civil service gives you a job as a mechanical engineer, and a

00:23:53 wonderful salary of $2,000 a year, and in 1938, it made me very rich.

00:23:59 I worked in the brilliant people who let me invent when nobody was looking, both legally

00:24:04 and illegally.

00:24:06 People say, what is an illegal invention?

00:24:08 It means you're working with a national, international standard, and you decide it's no good, and

00:24:12 you change it.

00:24:13 As long as nobody knows, it becomes the international standard again.

00:24:18 Well, you work with very old equipment, and it bothers you.

00:24:23 Anyway, that, by the way, is one of the definition inventors.

00:24:29 They have lower, very low threshold for stuff that doesn't work so well.

00:24:35 Anyway, as a result of that, I was moved to secret defense work just before Pearl Harbor,

00:24:41 six months before Pearl Harbor.

00:24:43 After that, I never had to do any routine work.

00:24:45 All I had to do is invent, test, and invent some more.

00:24:48 It was quite a thing.

00:24:49 In 1953, because of some dirty politics, the Bureau was reorganized, split, the director

00:24:55 was fired.

00:24:56 All sorts of terrible things happened, and I was very unhappy.

00:24:59 I left the government, formed my own company, some pictures that you saw.

00:25:03 Eventually, I started with one mechanic, and by the time I was finished, 10 years later,

00:25:09 I had 30 engineers and 100 mechanics.

00:25:12 I was inventing like crazy, and people would come and look at that museum of my stuff,

00:25:18 and they'd say, this is beautiful, but we don't want any of it.

00:25:20 We want you to work on our problems.

00:25:22 I have a client, and I have another client, and so eventually, it was a big business,

00:25:28 and I became part of Control Data Corporation because of some of the gadgets I built.

00:25:34 After 18 years of being in industry, I said, to hell with it.

00:25:37 I told the director then, who's Lou Branscombe, that I'd like to come back, and now you'll

00:25:42 appreciate what it means to have some fame.

00:25:46 He says, good.

00:25:47 We have a job for you.

00:25:48 I said, what?

00:25:49 He says, I don't know.

00:25:50 We'll think of something.

00:25:52 I came back.

00:25:53 I'm still there.

00:25:54 It's many, many years, and it's good.

00:25:57 Now, the name of the Bureau of Standards has been changed.

00:26:03 It's now the Institute of Standards and Technology, and its director is Ray Kammer.

00:26:08 I was told that he's going to be here tonight also, but I can't see him in the audience.

00:26:14 Anyway, I have to thank, only two more thanks.

00:26:18 First of all, I want to thank Arthur, I think it's grandson, for doing this.

00:26:23 I was playing with it, as I said, a couple of days in New York, and I'm looking forward

00:26:28 to owning one, because it's a very good gadget.

00:26:30 You can make gadgets like this that just move things, but this does very interesting.

00:26:34 It spells out words, and it's only supposed to go in one direction, and I'm looking forward

00:26:40 to having one of those before I get too old.

00:26:45 I also want to thank this great museum for two things.

00:26:50 Because they exhibit now and then, some of my gadgets today, I saw some of them in a

00:26:54 photo session, and it's nice to see your own work.

00:26:57 You feel very proud, and it's a great honor.

00:27:01 I also want to thank this great museum for doing something I had never expected to see

00:27:06 in my lifetime.

00:27:07 They provided valet parking.

00:27:11 Thank you very much.

00:27:13 Thank you.

00:27:25 Now we come to the presentation of this year's Lemelson-MIT Prize for Outstanding Achievement

00:27:32 in Invention and Innovation.

00:27:35 It is the most generous award of its kind in the world, but its chief importance is

00:27:41 that it gives public recognition to innovators among us who do so much to enrich and improve

00:27:47 our lives while fueling the engines of our economy.

00:27:53 Candidates for the prize must be US citizens or permanent residents who hold two or more

00:27:58 patents, one of which must be for a product or process that has had or has the potential

00:28:05 to have significant benefit to society.

00:28:10 Candidates are identified by nominators, who are themselves innovators and leaders

00:28:15 in industry, academia, and government.

00:28:19 They may be nominated in any of five categories, medicine and health care, energy and environment,

00:28:28 computers and telecommunication, consumer products, and industrial products.

00:28:35 Although MIT administers the awards program, it controls neither the nomination nor the

00:28:40 selection processes.

00:28:43 This year, the prize board has selected a prolific and trailblazing pioneer in biomedical

00:28:49 and chemical engineering.

00:28:51 He is an astonishingly productive inventor.

00:28:56 Over 300 patents bear his name.

00:28:59 But he is also a popular and successful teacher and scholar.

00:29:04 Indeed, all of us who work, study, or teach at MIT

00:29:08 are deeply proud that he has made the Institute his professional home since 1977.

00:29:15 Though he is perhaps best known for his work on controlled drug delivery systems

00:29:20 and polymer-based artificial skin, his interests and achievements

00:29:24 cover a range of fields as various as vaccines, waste disposal technology,

00:29:31 and tissue engineering.

00:29:33 He has earned numerous other prizes, including the Gairdner Foundation International

00:29:39 Award, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers William Walker

00:29:43 Award, and the USDA's Wiley Medal.

00:29:48 His greatest distinction, however, is earned and re-earned with each passing day,

00:29:53 as in hospitals across the nation, his therapies and techniques

00:29:58 save thousands of lives.

00:30:01 We are honored by the opportunity to further recognize his exceptional

00:30:05 achievements as an innovator in service to humanity.

00:30:09 The winner of this year's Lemelson-MIT Prize

00:30:13 is MIT's own Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering,

00:30:18 Dr. Robert S. Langer.

00:30:24 No wonder Dr. Robert Langer is in such a hurry.

00:30:27 With more than 300 patents, 500 plus articles,

00:30:30 and 12 books to his name, all this and he's only 49,

00:30:34 he has no time to slow down.

00:30:36 Though he modestly refers to himself as a biomedical engineer,

00:30:40 that's a vast understatement from this MIT professor.

00:30:44 Langer is a pioneer in a field called tissue engineering,

00:30:47 creating synthetic foundations to support the growth of new cells.

00:30:52 That means surgeons can use custom-made materials instead of transplanted ones.

00:30:57 For example, in the case of the artificial heart, what people do

00:30:59 is they take a lady's girdle.

00:31:01 In the case of an artificial blood vessel,

00:31:03 they take something you can sew with that you can get from a clothes store.

00:31:07 But what we thought would be a much better strategy

00:31:09 would be to ask the question what you really want in a medical material

00:31:12 from a chemistry and biology and engineering standpoint,

00:31:15 and then synthesize them.

00:31:17 It's all about plastics, polymers that combine with the patient's own cells,

00:31:22 yielding new skin for burn victims, or new bone, new cartilage, even possibly

00:31:27 a new nose.

00:31:29 The synthetic polymers form a sort of scaffolding for the living tissue.

00:31:33 Since they're biodegradable, they dissolve over time.

00:31:37 Almost no one in the scientific community thought this process would work.

00:31:41 But Langer and his colleague, Dr. Jay Vacanti, confounded the skeptics.

00:31:46 We're actually now designing and implanting heart valves.

00:31:50 And these heart valves are different than what's currently given to patients.

00:31:55 These valves are actually made from the cells of the patient themselves,

00:31:59 placed on special polymers that eventually disappear.

00:32:02 And we end up with a new heart valve that's

00:32:05 indistinguishable in most aspects from the original valve

00:32:09 that it's replacing.

00:32:10 Dr. Langer also dispelled another belief widely held by scientists.

00:32:14 The consensus was that plastics could be used only

00:32:17 as a vehicle for the controlled release of small molecules, such as steroids.

00:32:21 When we first discovered that you could deliver big molecules,

00:32:25 like peptides, or proteins, or even DNA, people really

00:32:29 didn't believe it.

00:32:30 It took a long time to convince them.

00:32:32 But that discovery really changed a lot of things.

00:32:34 And now you can use plastics to deliver almost anything,

00:32:38 anti-cancer drugs, growth hormones, many others.

00:32:41 That alone would guarantee Dr. Langer a prominent reputation.

00:32:45 But there are also hundreds of brain cancer patients who owe him their lives.

00:32:50 He and colleague Dr. Henry Brehm developed a novel system

00:32:54 to dispense drugs through dissolving plastic wafers that

00:32:57 can be implanted directly into the patient's brain,

00:33:00 right in the cavity created when a tumor is removed.

00:33:04 In this way, the drugs work locally, via slow time release,

00:33:08 at concentrations up to 1,000 times those achieved with normal chemotherapy,

00:33:13 while minimizing the often brutal side effects on the rest of the body.

00:33:19 With colleague Dr. Joseph Coase, the indefatigable Langer

00:33:22 is currently developing another mechanism for drug delivery,

00:33:26 a painless, non-invasive injection system using ultrasound technology.

00:33:30 This would be particularly useful for diabetics and others

00:33:33 who need to medicate themselves on a daily basis.

00:33:36 I think what drives me to invent is I can see the good

00:33:39 that inventions can do for people.

00:33:42 I think inventions can change many things in the world.

00:33:45 It can make people healthier, make people live longer,

00:33:47 come up with ways to relieve suffering.

00:33:49 And really, the satisfaction of doing some good is what drives me to invent.

00:33:55 Even though he showed an early aptitude for the sciences that

00:33:58 began with playful experiments on a home chemistry set,

00:34:01 Dr. Langer says he was not a born inventor.

00:34:04 I felt like I was somebody who just worked hard and solved problems.

00:34:07 But I said I hoped that as time progressed

00:34:09 that I would transform into somebody who would come up with more ideas.

00:34:13 Today, I probably think of myself in exactly the opposite way

00:34:17 as I would have many years ago.

00:34:19 Today, mostly I create things and I invent things.

00:34:22 If no born inventor, he is a born mentor.

00:34:26 The junior professor is so popular that colleagues

00:34:29 joke that many people around the world claim him as their best friend.

00:34:33 And he has been recognized repeatedly by his students and peers

00:34:36 for his talents as a teacher.

00:34:39 Ever the optimist, with 310 patents and still counting,

00:34:43 he has this advice for those coming after him.

00:34:46 So many times when you try to do something in science

00:34:50 or to try to invent something, people will tell you it's impossible,

00:34:53 that it will never work.

00:34:54 And I think that's very rarely so.

00:34:56 I think if you really believe in yourself,

00:34:58 if you really stick to things, that there's very little that's really

00:35:01 impossible.

00:35:04 Thank you.

00:35:05 Thank you.

00:35:06 Thank you.

00:35:07 Thank you.

00:35:08 Thank you.

00:35:09 Great, great today.

00:35:10 MAN 3

00:35:11 Thank you.

00:35:11 Thank you.

00:35:12 Thank you.

00:35:14 We had some very great panelists.

00:35:17 ALAN MITCHELL

00:35:20 Dr. Vest, Dr. Crew, Dr. Thurow, Mrs. Lemelson, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.

00:35:39 I feel very proud and very humbled as I stand before you today to receive this prize, all

00:35:45 the more so because of the tremendous people that have received it in previous years as

00:35:50 well as this year.

00:35:51 And some, of course, are in the audience tonight.

00:35:54 And in addition, I feel that way because of the remarkable contributions of Dr. Lemelson

00:35:59 himself.

00:36:00 What I'd like to do just briefly is to give you a little bit of an idea about how inventions

00:36:04 take place, at least in the academic world, and then to thank the people who are really

00:36:08 responsible for me being here tonight.

00:36:11 I thought I'd give you an example.

00:36:14 In that video, we saw work that Henry Brehm and I did, which ultimately led to a new treatment

00:36:19 for brain cancer.

00:36:20 I thought I'd go over how that started.

00:36:23 And in 1980, when we started work thinking about this, I wanted to see if we could create

00:36:29 a new biodegradable polymer, a polymer that if you put it in the human body in the presence

00:36:33 of water would degrade.

00:36:35 And we had a theory that we came up with that a certain family of polymers called polyanhydrides

00:36:41 would do this and do it very well.

00:36:43 But it was just a theory.

00:36:44 And one of the things that a professor always learns to do is to tell their students to

00:36:49 do a literature review.

00:36:51 And so I had a very good student, Howie Rosen.

00:36:54 And I said, could you review the literature and see if you could find anything on this

00:36:58 that might help us?

00:36:59 It's also important for patents to see whatever happened before.

00:37:02 So Howie went and reviewed the literature from 1970 to 1980, and there were zero papers

00:37:07 and patents on these polymers.

00:37:10 So I said, well, that's good.

00:37:11 But I said, why don't you try to go back further and see if there's anything you can find?

00:37:15 So he went back another 10 years to 1960 and still didn't find anything.

00:37:20 So I said, that's good.

00:37:21 But you see, professors are in a very powerful position.

00:37:23 And you can ask the students to do anything.

00:37:25 So I said, well, I want to be sure about this.

00:37:27 So why don't you just go back further?

00:37:29 And it's very interesting.

00:37:30 In 1959 and for many years before, we saw about 100 papers come out of a single place

00:37:36 in Japan from the Toyo Rayon Company, and all authored by a person named Naoya Yoda.

00:37:45 And I thought that was very interesting, because there were all these papers, and then they

00:37:48 stopped dead in 1959.

00:37:51 No papers for over 20 years.

00:37:53 Well, this was now 1981.

00:37:56 And it turned out I had to go to Japan to give a lecture at a big conference, actually.

00:38:01 And so Howie said to me, he said, well, since I did all this work, how about if you now

00:38:04 go track down Yoda to see if you can learn about why they stopped and everything.

00:38:10 So I flew over to Japan.

00:38:12 It was the first time I'd been there.

00:38:14 And this was my goal, my quest to find Yoda.

00:38:21 It's actually a true story.

00:38:24 Now you know when you go to scientific meetings, even with many, many people, like a meeting

00:38:28 like this even, everybody has a name tag.

00:38:31 So I spent most of that week, there were thousands of people there, and I spent most of the week

00:38:34 looking at everybody's name tag.

00:38:36 And actually, in that week, I actually found three different Yodas.

00:38:41 Unfortunately, none of them worked for this company.

00:38:44 And then on the very last day, I'd pretty much given up.

00:38:47 I was sitting next to somebody at lunch, and I looked at his name tag, you know, the big

00:38:50 name that didn't say Yoda.

00:38:51 But I looked underneath it, and it said Toyo Rea and Company.

00:38:55 And I was very excited.

00:38:56 I said to him, I said, do you know Yoda?

00:38:58 And he said, Yoda?

00:38:59 He said, of course.

00:39:00 He lives in New York.

00:39:02 So, so I was very excited.

00:39:08 I flew home, and I told Howie this, and we called Yoda up, and he was very, very pleased.

00:39:13 He was kind of old by then.

00:39:14 But he flew up to Boston, and he actually spent several hours telling us all about the

00:39:19 different chemistry that he did.

00:39:21 And it was very, very useful to us.

00:39:24 And you know, remember, he's working in the Toyo Rea and Company, he's trying to actually

00:39:28 make clothes.

00:39:29 What I said to him, I said, at the end, I just have one final question.

00:39:32 I said, why did you publish these hundred papers, and then stop in 1959, and never do

00:39:37 anything again?

00:39:38 And he got this very sad look in his eyes.

00:39:40 He said, well, you know, we solved a lot of these chemistry problems, but there was one

00:39:44 problem we could never solve.

00:39:46 And I said, what's that?

00:39:47 And he said, well, you know, people would walk out in the rain, or they'd put the clothes

00:39:51 in a washing machine, and they'd dissolve.

00:39:58 I said to him, I said, gee, that's bad.

00:40:15 But we went, we knew then that our experiments would work, that this had to work.

00:40:19 We had a whole, you know, it saved us actually a lot of time.

00:40:22 And we went ahead, made these polymers, and later worked with Dr. Bremens, really led

00:40:26 to the first new treatment that the FDA approved using biodegradable polymers for anti-cancer

00:40:32 delivery in over 20 years.

00:40:34 So we were really very, very pleased about that.

00:40:37 And it's just an example of how we kind of try to do some inventions in academics.

00:40:42 I guess the second point that I want to get across is that, you know, one person gets

00:40:45 an award.

00:40:46 I guess in my case, I feel a lot of people contribute to my being here today.

00:40:50 And I feel really lucky, both on a personal level, a professional academic level, and

00:40:54 I've also really had the opportunity on a third part to work with some great people

00:40:58 and companies.

00:41:01 So first, I want to thank my wife, Laura, who's just been tremendously supportive.

00:41:05 She's a PhD scientist herself, actually, from MIT in neuroscience, and has been a wonderful

00:41:10 sounding board for my ideas.

00:41:12 And in addition, she does so many things for me and our three children.

00:41:17 And so that kind of enables me to work hard and, you know, try to do the things that I

00:41:21 try to do academically.

00:41:25 I also want to thank my family.

00:41:26 I was very fortunate to grow up with a wonderful mother and father and sister.

00:41:33 And I'm very pleased that my mother and sister, and actually my sister's husband, Brian, came

00:41:39 to see this tonight.

00:41:40 I feel that the kind of inspiration that my father, in particular, gave me in science

00:41:45 and math, and just the kindness of my mother, those kinds of elements come together and

00:41:52 I think make me the kind of person, good or bad, that I am.

00:41:56 And finally, in this group of people, I feel enormously fortunate to have some terrific

00:42:01 friends.

00:42:02 And the advice and friendship that they've given me over the years has just been very

00:42:04 helpful.

00:42:05 And I wanted to thank, in particular, Stephanie Meilman and Gary Wettrick and Bruce Zetter

00:42:10 and Sally Arif for coming tonight.

00:42:13 You know, in my professional life, I've had a number of people who've really helped me

00:42:17 a lot.

00:42:18 First person who was really an inspiration to me was my postdoctoral advisor, Judah Folkman,

00:42:23 who was a true visionary and really got me started on so many things, both by his work

00:42:28 and by his example.

00:42:29 And I've also benefited tremendously from the advice and help of some terrific collaborators

00:42:34 who are also some of my very closest friends.

00:42:36 And these include Alex Klebanoff at MIT, Jay Vacanti at Harvard, and Henry Brehm at Johns

00:42:42 Hopkins.

00:42:43 Henry, actually, was on vacation with his wife and three children in Israel and flew

00:42:48 back three days early just to come to this.

00:42:50 And Henry, more than anybody else, is responsible for those cancer treatments.

00:42:55 I've also been very fortunate to have had a tremendous amount of support from my department

00:42:58 heads.

00:42:59 Particularly, I want to thank Bob Brown, who's now dean at MIT, and Bob Armstrong.

00:43:04 And I've had a wonderful administrative assistant, Pam Brown, who's worked with me for over 16

00:43:08 years and really runs the laboratory.

00:43:12 And in addition, I've had some terrific industrial collaborators who've not only worked with

00:43:17 us closely and have been good friends, but have really been key to making some important

00:43:22 financial contributions to our lab, which has really been very, very helpful to us.

00:43:26 And I want to thank Jonathan Rosen, Barry Solomon, Imitus Chaudhry, and Mark Chayeson

00:43:31 for this.

00:43:32 Thirdly, one of my big goals is not only to do the best scientific work I can in published

00:43:39 papers, but I want those papers and those things we find in the MIT laboratory to really

00:43:45 lead to actual products that can improve people's lives.

00:43:49 And to do this requires a whole other set of people who have really made that happen.

00:43:55 And in that regard, I've had the tremendous fortune to work with who I think is the best

00:43:59 patent lawyer in the country, Patria Patz from Atlanta.

00:44:02 And I also think the best technology transfer person in the country, Lita Nelson from MIT.

00:44:08 And I've had the tremendous fortune to work with a number of small biotechnology and medical

00:44:13 device companies, who in large part are very unique to the United States.

00:44:17 You don't see these in other countries nearly to the same degree.

00:44:21 And these companies have provided the heart and soul of converting inventions into real

00:44:25 products that extend life and relieve suffering.

00:44:28 And I've had the really good fortune to work with people who have put money into these

00:44:32 companies and provided initial leadership for these companies.

00:44:36 And this I wanted to thank Terry McGuire, Lindsay Rosenwald, Mark Levin, and Jim McNabb,

00:44:42 who've all been enormously helpful to me.

00:44:44 And I've worked with some terrific chairman or chief executive officers of a number of

00:44:49 these startup companies, who again have really made these things happen.

00:44:53 And I wanted to here thank Sherry Oberg, Craig Smith, David Clapper, Gary Cleary, and Robert Heft.

00:45:02 Finally, I want to thank the late Jerome Lemelson and the entire Lemelson family for having

00:45:06 the vision and the generosity to establish the award.

00:45:10 One of the goals of this award is to really stimulate young inventors by establishing

00:45:16 role models in other programs.

00:45:18 And this award is really truly unique in its emphasis on invention and innovation.

00:45:23 And I hope it really, and I believe it really does, help and inspire young inventors everywhere,

00:45:28 which can only improve the future for all of our lives and everyone else's.

00:45:32 Thank you.

00:45:33 It's been an enormous honor.

00:45:34 Thank you very much.

00:45:35 Thank you.

00:45:36 Thank you.

00:45:37 Thank you.

00:45:38 Thank you.

00:45:39 Thank you.

00:45:40 Thank you.

00:45:41 Thank you.

00:45:42 Thank you.

00:45:43 Thank you.

00:45:44 Thank you.

00:45:45 Now we come to the moment in these proceedings when in years past I have introduced Jerome

00:45:51 H. Lemelson.

00:45:52 To my great regret, I can do so no longer.

00:45:58 On October 1, 1997, Jerry left us.

00:46:03 But he bequeathed to us a lasting legacy of soaring imagination, practical wisdom,

00:46:10 and successful innovation, and we will miss him greatly.

00:46:15 To honor his memory and to take pleasure in his achievements, we have created a short

00:46:20 video tribute to his life and work.

00:46:23 In the 20s and 30s, to a young boy named Jerry Lemelson, New York City's Staten Island

00:46:33 was a country paradise.

00:46:36 There his imagination had waned, along with the mottled planes he flew in the empty field.

00:46:41 When he grew up, poor vision prevented him from realizing his dream of becoming a pilot,

00:46:47 but he did develop weapons systems for the U.S. Army Air Corps in Alaska during World

00:46:51 War II.

00:46:53 Afterward, he carried home aeronautical and industrial engineering degrees from New York

00:46:57 University.

00:46:59 His brief corporate career came to an abrupt end when an employer refused to implement

00:47:03 a life-saving safety improvement he had suggested.

00:47:07 From then on, the only one who employed Jerry Lemelson was Jerry himself and his inspiration.

00:47:14 In his 30s, he married Dorothy Ginsburg, whom he had met briefly as a child.

00:47:19 On the way back from their honeymoon, the dedicated young inventor couldn't resist

00:47:22 a visit to the patent office in Washington.

00:47:26 Often it was Dorothy's work as an interior designer that kept them afloat during the

00:47:30 lean years, and Jerry struggled for recognition from his attic workshop and the family home.

00:47:35 Yet his ideas kept coming.

00:47:38 In the 50s, he invented seeing robots, then fax technology, way ahead of its time.

00:47:44 In the 60s, a system for manufacturing integrated circuits.

00:47:48 In the 70s, magnetic tape drives that were used in nearly every Sony Walkman.

00:47:54 His fertile mind was churning out patents at the rate of one a month, a pace he kept

00:47:59 for 40 years.

00:48:00 If you include those that are pending, the total is more than 500 in all, more than any

00:48:06 other American except Thomas Edison.

00:48:09 The sheer range of his innovations is dazzling, touching all facets of modern life.

00:48:14 From manufacturing to toys, key components of bar code readers, ATM machines, cordless

00:48:20 telephones, VCRs and CDs, not to mention brakes for inline skates, Velcro darts, and on and

00:48:27 on and on.

00:48:29 Yet for all his creativity, only a small fraction of his ideas found markets, and many met with

00:48:34 resistance.

00:48:35 In 1977, for instance, a patent examiner told him that miniaturizing video technology into

00:48:41 a small camcorder would be impossible.

00:48:45 Success came to Jerry later in life, with little impact on his lifestyle.

00:48:50 He once joked that he still walked around the house turning off lights, but he turned

00:48:54 on many other lights.

00:48:55 When he and Dorothy established the Lemelson Foundation to promote American invention through

00:49:00 its initiatives at the Smithsonian, Hampshire College, the University of Nevada at Reno,

00:49:06 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

00:49:09 Though cancer claimed Jerry's life, his legacy survives.

00:49:12 He always championed the cause of the independent inventor, whose imagination could help close

00:49:18 what he called America's ingenuity gap.

00:49:21 Above all, he wanted young people to consider invention as a career in the first place.

00:49:28 For a closer look, we turn now to Jerry himself, and to those who knew him best.

00:49:35 These young people will seek to become entertainers and leaders in fields of various sports, and

00:49:44 my concern is that we'll have a shortage of what I believe to be the most important people

00:49:49 in this country, the people who create the new technologies and new products.

00:49:54 He had the ability to go into this complete encyclopedia of scientific fact, and extract

00:50:08 an element from here and an element from there, and put these things that seem to have no

00:50:15 connection together.

00:50:17 Every hour, almost on the hour, Jerry would wake up, the light would go on, true story,

00:50:24 the light would go on, he would enter his idea in the book, the light would go off,

00:50:30 he'd go to sleep, the next hour, the same thing.

00:50:32 In the morning, I had from 6-8 inventions to witness, and I did.

00:50:38 This happened every night, seven nights a week, every week.

00:50:45 Jerry had the most fertile mind of any man I ever knew.

00:50:49 With kids, Jerry did some of the traditional things that a father does with two sons.

00:50:56 He played ball with us, he'd go swimming with us on vacations, of course he'd lie on the

00:51:01 beach in between dips in the water and take notes on a legal pad.

00:51:04 When he was creating, he was very happy.

00:51:07 I believe that they talk about transcendental meditation, but when someone is able to work

00:51:16 and immerse themselves in what they're doing, with the kind of enthusiasm and faith that

00:51:24 Jerry had, that brings an intense kind of satisfaction and joy.

00:51:29 Jerry would have us test out toy ideas, we'd go to toy stores, and he'd pick things off

00:51:36 the shelves and he'd bring them home, and if we were lucky, we'd get to play with them

00:51:40 before he took them apart, because he didn't always put them back together.

00:51:44 I don't believe it was luck.

00:51:46 It was intelligence, genius, intuitiveness, and stick-to-itiveness.

00:51:56 He just kept pushing and pushing for what he felt was right.

00:52:01 He didn't seem to be held in by limits.

00:52:04 He'd never say, well, I don't really have enough knowledge to design a new medical delivery

00:52:11 system, I'm not a doctor.

00:52:13 He'd never say that.

00:52:14 He'd say, well, why can't I try?

00:52:17 And that's what he would do, even though, and sometimes, sometimes it seems like, how

00:52:23 can he be working in this?

00:52:24 He has no experience in this field, but he didn't care.

00:52:28 He was very gentle and very mild, and very loving and kind, but he was a very big fighter.

00:52:39 He believed in never giving up.

00:52:43 I've had a substantial amount of success in the last five years in licensing my patents,

00:52:51 and I feel an obligation to plow back a portion of the income I've made to improve the lot

00:52:59 of the inventor of America and to improve the future economy of this country.

00:53:21 Thank you very much.

00:53:31 Now, it is my pleasure to turn the podium over to the three most important people in

00:53:48 Jerry Lemelson's life.

00:53:51 His wife, Dolly, and his sons, Eric and Robert, please.

00:54:18 It is with great pleasure that I greet you this evening.

00:54:22 It promises to be one of joy and remembrance, as we have just seen in the tribute to my

00:54:29 husband.

00:54:30 I have something to add to the tribute.

00:54:33 It was something no one mentioned.

00:54:35 I don't think too many people knew that.

00:54:38 One of Jerry's great joys was dancing, and he loved to jitterbug.

00:54:45 I would like to thank Dr. Spenter Crewe and the National Museum of American History for

00:54:52 hosting this celebration.

00:54:55 I would also like to thank Dr. Charles Vest and Mr. Lester Thurow of MIT for identifying

00:55:03 such worthy recipients, Dr. Robert Langer and Jacob Rabinow.

00:55:10 They are both wonderful.

00:55:14 Several months ago, I was going through old videotapes, which Jerry had made.

00:55:20 I discovered one in which he was walking in Battleground Park in Princeton.

00:55:26 He was walking the same path that Washington and his troops marched in the Battle of Princeton,

00:55:35 and he was discussing the battle and its meaning.

00:55:38 It was an event that ended with the death of General Mercer under the great elm that

00:55:45 was in Princeton.

00:55:49 It was a poignant moment for me because Jerry was very taken with the whole scene and the

00:55:55 history that it represents.

00:55:58 He loved and appreciated the privilege of being an American and all that citizenship

00:56:05 implies.

00:56:08 I believe that this love of country formed a profound base for all he did.

00:56:16 He also had a deep love for the work he pursued.

00:56:19 Like many others in the long American tradition of the independent inventor, he viewed each

00:56:26 innovation, each patent as a unique creation worthy of respect and acknowledgment.

00:56:36 His dream of illuminating and honoring the creative spirit has been exhibited this evening

00:56:44 in this wonderful Museum of American History with a panoply of brilliant minds and achievements.

00:56:53 Robert Langer, Jacob Rabinow, and Akhil Madhani exemplify all that Jerry wished the recipients

00:57:01 of the prize to be in the depth of their work and the quality of their lives.

00:57:10 We are also so delighted that previous recipients have joined us this evening,

00:57:17 Wilson Greatbatch and Nathan Cain, in all a wonderful and splendid group.

00:57:25 Wilson Greatbatch, Nathan Cain, and Akhil Madhani, will you please stand?

00:57:47 We are very proud to continue to foster Jerry's dreams.

00:57:55 Thank you all for sharing this evening with us, and thank you, MIT, for this celebration of mind and spirit.

00:58:04 Thank you.

00:58:16 Thank you and welcome from the Lemelson family.

00:58:18 We would also like to thank Henry Amparo and the rest of the staff of the Lemelson-MIT program

00:58:24 for their incredible work in organizing this year's event.

00:58:28 As you might imagine, this evening has a touch of the bittersweet for us.

00:58:32 We are tremendously pleased and honored to be here to meet and congratulate this year's award winners,

00:58:38 but of course we are acutely aware of my father's absence.

00:58:42 In preparing to speak at tonight's event, I came back again and again

00:58:46 to thoughts of some of Jerry's attributes that I most admired.

00:58:50 His intense devotion to his inventing, to his creative side,

00:58:54 his fundamental belief in justice for all Americans,

00:58:58 and his commitment to making the world a better place.

00:59:02 More than once, my father described his creative process as a form of problem solving,

00:59:08 and you've heard reference to that from our award winners tonight.

00:59:12 Throughout Jerry's life, he looked at the world and saw conundrums.

00:59:16 He saw things that didn't work as well as they could or should,

00:59:19 processes and products that he could improve.

00:59:23 Put another way, he saw problems and ways to resolve them

00:59:26 that would improve the lives of real people.

00:59:29 Over the last several years, Jerry worked in the field of drug delivery methods for cancer.

00:59:36 It was typical of him to meet a crisis with the attitude that he could find, indeed invent, a solution.

00:59:42 I have a brief story that illustrates that.

00:59:45 Jerry went in for a whole series of medical treatments when he was ill.

00:59:50 On a number of occasions, he had an endoscopy done

00:59:54 where they stick a device down your throat and look at your stomach.

00:59:58 On one of those occasions, he was under local anesthetic,

01:00:02 and he was observing the whole process.

01:00:05 Unlike some of us, I would be somewhere else during that.

01:00:09 By the time the examination was over, he had invented an improvement to the endoscope.

01:00:15 I think that says something about who he was.

01:00:19 I know Jerry would be proud to meet and honor Rob Langer,

01:00:22 whose work in the medical field is truly astounding

01:00:25 and its potential to revolutionize the treatment of diseases such as cancer.

01:00:29 as well as in treating severe injuries such as burns.

01:00:32 I should mention Rob and I were discussing Mr. Langer yesterday when we met him,

01:00:38 and the use of ultrasound to introduce drugs into the body

01:00:44 kind of reminded us of Star Trek, which is a show that Jerry liked to watch with us.

01:00:49 Robert Langer has an abiding commitment to improving the lives of others with his inventions.

01:00:54 Like my father, he also possesses a strong belief in himself,

01:00:58 in his ability to persevere in the creative process.

01:01:01 And he also has the relatively rare ability to combine the results of his own research

01:01:06 in basic science with the practical application of that knowledge.

01:01:10 I can't help but think that if Jerry was here tonight,

01:01:13 he'd take this year's prize winner, indeed probably both prize winners,

01:01:16 off in a corner to talk shop, and none of us would get to talk to any of them.

01:01:21 In Jack Rabinow, Jerry would recognize both a kindred soul and a man with a similar life story.

01:01:27 They had many things in common, including the desire to work in different fields at the same time,

01:01:32 the ability to bridge disciplines and ignore barriers that stopped others,

01:01:36 and the great gift to love their work.

01:01:39 I must admit that I never saw my father happier and more alive than when he was inventing.

01:01:44 I also wanted to mention this year's prize winner,

01:01:48 Akeel Madani, who I met when I presented him with the Student Prize Award several months ago at MIT.

01:01:53 Akeel has a keen and very creative mind and spirit,

01:01:56 an evident commitment to helping others,

01:01:59 and is a great choice for this year's student prize.

01:02:02 I know we'll be hearing more about his work in the years to come.

01:02:06 In closing, let me just say that we intend to continue to work with you

01:02:12 In closing, let me just say that we intend to continue Jerry's legacy

01:02:17 and honor his memory through the work of the Lemelson Foundation.

01:02:21 Our world faces a host of interrelated problems,

01:02:24 including the need to restore global ecosystems,

01:02:27 the need to educate, employ, feed, and assure the health of the billions of people

01:02:31 who will be born in the next few decades, and many other pressing issues.

01:02:36 While technology may not solve all of humanity's problems,

01:02:40 we know that human ingenuity and inventiveness will provide the basis for most, if not all, of the solutions.

01:02:46 The Lemelson Foundation intends to continue our efforts to inspire and support

01:02:51 the next generation of inventors who we will need to meet tomorrow's challenges.

01:02:55 Thank you.

01:02:57 Well, I know Jerry's looking down from us in that great patent office in the sky,

01:03:09 and he's really pleased tonight.

01:03:11 Maybe he's thinking about that first MIT Lemelson award ceremony we had here four years ago.

01:03:17 Jerry had prepared a speech, and he was really nervous.

01:03:21 He lost his speech. He went up there without his speech.

01:03:24 So what did he do? He innovated. He invented. He created.

01:03:28 And his speech was inspired and inspiring,

01:03:31 much as the work of tonight's prize winners we celebrate tonight, inspired and inspiring.

01:03:37 That night, necessity and public speaking anxiety was certainly the mother of invention.

01:03:43 My father firmly believed that invention and innovation were the key to a vibrant society.

01:03:48 It's my belief it's also an essential aspect of human nature.

01:03:53 Inventiveness is hardwired into our brains, into our consciousness.

01:03:57 For invention is a fundamental human attribute.

01:04:01 It is human nature as much as bipedalism, the opposable thumb, and the development of language.

01:04:07 Invention and innovation are fundamental not only for economic success,

01:04:11 but in some cases for the basic survival of society, or even the survival of a species.

01:04:17 Take, for instance, the difference in evolution between Homo sapiens and our near hominid relatives, the Neanderthals.

01:04:24 Why did Homo sapiens triumph in a relatively short period of time to cover the earth,

01:04:29 and Neanderthals disappeared entirely?

01:04:32 Well, there's a recent study done on the bone fractures of Neanderthal skeletons,

01:04:39 and they lived a really rough life.

01:04:43 Innovative paleontologists thought,

01:04:46 why don't I compare these with different occupational groups and see if there's any sort of correlation?

01:04:52 The correlation, he found, was with rodeo riders.

01:04:55 That rodeo riders, bronco busters, had the same sort of patterns of bone injuries and bone breakages

01:05:01 on their limbs and in the rest of their body that the Neanderthals had.

01:05:06 The theory is that the Neanderthals never innovated.

01:05:09 They never got beyond really using a short spear.

01:05:13 So when they would go out and hunt a mastodon,

01:05:16 they were coming right next to it and jabbing the spear in,

01:05:19 and they were getting gored and stomped and killed in probably great numbers by this form of hunting.

01:05:25 Whereas at the same time, while their technology didn't change for a million years,

01:05:31 Homo sapiens were evolving continuously until the point of getting a bow and arrow

01:05:36 and not having to get close to the animal at all.

01:05:38 So I say this in all seriousness that inventiveness and innovation is part of what it means to be human.

01:05:47 But, like all human nature, it is influenced by nurture, by culture, by political structures, by institutions,

01:05:55 by values, which can aid or hinder a society's development.

01:06:00 So just because inventiveness is latent in human nature

01:06:04 does not mean it will always be manifest in a society.

01:06:07 Like anything in culture, it needs to be supported, it needs to be encouraged,

01:06:11 it needs to be given attention, not unlike the raising of a child.

01:06:15 And it is the mission of the Lemelson Foundation to provide whatever assistance we're able to

01:06:20 to nurture innovation and invention.

01:06:24 It was Jerry's firm belief that fundamental American values, freedom, democracy,

01:06:30 protection of individual rights, equality of opportunity, open and fair competition,

01:06:36 all of these have given us the most massive outpouring of innovation in human history

01:06:40 and made America a technological light to the world.

01:06:44 The evidence is physically all around us in this museum.

01:06:48 Jacob Rabinow and Robert Langer epitomize the American ideals of ingenuity, hard work, creativity,

01:06:54 and the creation of a better society and world through their ideas.

01:06:58 So part of what we do tonight is not only celebrate their genius,

01:07:03 but the genius of this American innovation.

01:07:06 And in celebrating the work, we are holding these two men up as models to be emulated by our young people,

01:07:12 as exemplars of the American dream, as American heroes.

01:07:16 Thank you.

01:07:18 Applause.

01:07:48 Thank you.

01:08:13 Thank you.

01:08:42 Thank you.