Emeritus: Engineering a new path
Editor’s note: This is part of a series of articles linking the work of MIT’s emeritus faculty members with the current state of research in their given fields.When MIT chemical engineering professor Paula Hammond cleans out her lab every few years, her students occasionally find bottles of the chemical polyethylene oxide that date back to the 1980s. The bottles are relics of the previous lab occupant, Professor Emeritus Edward Merrill, and a reminder of his legacy in developing polymers for biomedical uses. Merrill, one of a handful of researchers who pioneered the field of biomedical engineering in the 1960s and 70s, showed that polyethylene oxide, a polymer (long chain) of repeating units called ethers, is remarkably inert when in contact with blood, whereas most other materials cause blood to clot upon contact. He suspected that would make it ideal for biomedical applications such as drug delivery. Today, polyethylene oxide is...