Samuel Stupp tells Rebecca Gillan how science on the small scale can solve some of medicine's large scale problems.

Samuel Stupp is a board of trustees professor of materials science, chemistry and medicine and the Director of the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine at Northwestern University in Evanston and Chicago, US. He is a member of the editorial board for Soft Matter. He specialises in molecular self-assembly and his many research interests include developing biomaterials for regenerative medicine.

 

Who or what inspired you to become a scientist?

I remember being interested in cells and plants and biology in general, as well as chemistry. I remember always being interested in understanding things around me. The first fact that absolutely fascinated me was photosynthesis.

Your work is very interdisciplinary, encompassing cellular biology, nanotechnology and self assembly. What attracted you to interdisciplinary research?

I have always been interested in things that require knowledge of many things in order to understand them. This somehow evolved very naturally in my scientific career. I knew that, in order to pursue the problems that I was interested in, I had to know a range of subjects. This is reflected in many of the things that I do outside of science, in my social life, in my interest in art. I'm interested in people. All of that is interdisciplinary!

As an interdisciplinary researcher, do you feel that there is a conflict for the individual scientist in finding a balance between specialising in one field and having a broad understanding of many others?

Yes, of course it's hard to balance. The community has to take an interest in interdisciplinary education and start by asking what it really means. 

Interdisciplinary activity in science doesn't mean bringing disciplines together and bringing teams of people together to work on a problem. Unfortunately, that's what people call interdisciplinary research; situations where physicists and chemists and biologists are forced into a marriage that they don't want to be a part of, to do research because everybody believes that interdisciplinary science is the most important type of science for our future. 

Being interdisciplinary has to do with a single brain being able to speak different scientific languages. You have to be able to create the interface with the other disciplines yourself, rather than relying on your colleagues to do the things that you don't know how to do or how to think about. 

Some people may be more naturally inclined to be interdisciplinary but we need to think about how to promote or to induce more interdisciplinary behaviour in individuals who have that potential. 

What projects are you working on at the moment?

I have lots of projects! I am very interested these days in regenerative medicine, cancer therapies, and solar energy, using self assembly in all areas to arrive at structures with sophisticated function. Again, it's highly interdisciplinary. 

As part of my interest in regenerative medicine, I'm interested in stem cells and how to control and direct them through molecular design of artificial extracellular matrices. One of the things that I have a great interest in is in crossing the scales in self assembly. Thinking nano all the time is definitely not a good thing. What is most difficult and most challenging is to design at the nanoscale to express features in macroscopic objects. This crossing of the scales is the essence of imitating biology. A lot of my research in the pipeline right now has a lot to do with that.  

As science becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, how do you see the future of chemistry?

The future of chemistry is at its interfaces with biology and with functional systems. For the most part, this means novel materials, which is a lot more challenging than just designing and making molecules. And computational chemistry. Improvements in computational chemistry will obviously benefit the power of chemistry in being effective in understanding biological problems and predicting the functions of materials. I think the next big thing will be to invent functions. People discover new structures all the time by accident; the other side is that if you think in the context of design it is much easier to design a structure rather than design a function. 

Imagine that rubbery materials were not known. Would you invent the concept of a material that you could deform elastically by 2000/3000% of its original dimension?   Our world doesn't work without rubbery materials. The question is would you invent this concept for a material that would have this capacity to be elastic? Then think about what functions it could have. You could make things called cars that ride on rubbery tyres.

You have received many awards during your career and were recently named one of the '15 Scientists That Will Change Your World' by the Illinois Biotechnology Industrial Organization. What's the secret to being a successful scientist?

I think a certain ambition and passion for your work, a feeling that something is unbearably interesting. That passion is essential and there's nothing you can do to induce it. You either have it or you don't. And of course you have to be creative; if you're not creative you can't be a successful scientist.

Which of your achievements have you been most proud of throughout your career?

I was really fascinated by two things. One was the idea that we could create functional systems by self assembly. Everything I am doing now, working on spinal cord injury and heart muscle regeneration after heart attack, using molecules and functional nanostructures and networks, derives from that in a conceptual way. So that work was very important to me. Our work on the differentiation of neural stem cells and what came after that on spinal cord injury was another maximum.

If you could solve any scientific problem in any field, what would it be?

I would love to cure Alzheimer's disease. I would love to see a person walk again after they've been paralysed for years. Or provide vision to someone who has been blind from birth. I have an interest in human beings and the planet. The planet is on a huge scale compared to everything that we deal with in science. I've become really interested in its origins and I would love to help solve our energy problems too and all the consequential environmental problems.

And finally, if you weren't a scientist, what would you do?

I would like to be a movie director. It's creativity, it's dealing with lots of different things. You have to understand technology, people, art and perception. I use this energy for science instead, which I hope was the right decision!