WIKIMEDIA, CHEMICAL HERITAGE FOUNDATIONRobert Langer of MIT has earned this year’s Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, to the tune of £1 million (roughly $1.5 million).

According to a press release issued yesterday (February 3), “Langer was the first person to engineer polymers to control the delivery of large molecular weight drugs for the treatment of diseases such as cancer and mental illness. His unconventional thinking toppled the established view that controlled-release drug delivery would not work for large molecules like proteins, which are very sensitive to their surroundings.”

Langer has been involved in the development of cardiovascular stents, drugs to starve tumors of blood, cancer medication delivery systems, and artificial skin, among many other achievements.

“When I started doing a lot of this work in the 1970s, it probably was considered science fiction, in fact a lot of the people who reviewed our grants said we shouldn’t get the...