Linda Griffith

INTERVIEWER: We're speaking today with Professor Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Teaching Innovation Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where she directs the Center for Gynepathology Research. A biotechnologist, Professor Griffith is shaping the frontiers of tissue engineering and synthetic regenerative technologies through cutting-edge research at the intersection of materials science, cell surface chemistry, physiology, and anatomy. Her research areas include biomaterials, drug metabolism, women's health, systems biology, and bioinformatics.

She's currently directing an exciting project called Human Physiome on a Chip, which we'll talk about. Linda, you've been at MIT since 1988, initially in chemical engineering. You were the driving force behind the creation of the Biological Engineering major, which has served as a model for similar curricula around the world. You've earned many awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and your recent appointment as a MacVicar Fellow testifies to your outstanding teaching career at MIT.

So we have a lot to talk about. Let's get started, perhaps with your early days because we'll do a little chronological look at how you got to where you are now. And we'd love to hear about your life growing up in Georgia and influences.

GRIFFITH: So I grew up in South Georgia down near the Okefenokee Swamp and have an older brother, a younger sister, and a younger brother. And grew up in a neighborhood with lots and lots of kids, so we were outside all the time riding bikes, playing games, running around barefoot nine months a year. And it was a place to really discover nature, from fishing to learning about how plants grew. There were snakes and all kinds of crazy things.

So it was a very relaxed time that people focused on children and having good experiences. I went to public school, and again, a small town public school where the focus was on education. My mother had not finished college before she was married, but she was finishing college and getting a Master's degree. So she was always in school. So we got the impression, school is really important. We also were locked out of the house pretty much of the day so she could study, which was good. We got to discover nature and really learn how to be independent and do things on your own.

So--

INTERVIEWER: Was she studying science at all?

GRIFFITH: No. She was getting a sociology degree. Back in those days she felt that if something happened to my father she needed a career. So she became an elementary school teacher. And so she also, though, taught lifeguarding. She was a very active swimmer. She taught lifeguarding.

My father was the kind of person-- and this was true I guess of a lot of people back then-- but who fixed everything around the house. He built a stereo system and he was infinitely patient in teaching all of us children who were interested things like how to solder, how the system was designed. But he also was a very accomplished gardener and he did all the landscaping and we had a pretty large yard. This was deep South Georgia. And so taught me a lot about plants and grafting and propagation of plants and so on.

So it was a very rich time of learning about nature and about technologies. And back then there was only one kind of LEGO set. So we had LEGOs. And it was a time of just having time. There weren't the pressures I think there are on a lot of kids today. We played a lot. We built things out of LEGOs. We built things out of erector sets. We built mud pies. We built forts in the woods. And really got a sense of confidence, and also learning about resolution of differences and things among groups of kids playing different kinds of games.

And so it was a very wonderful place to grow up and be a child.

INTERVIEWER: And were you particularly gravitating towards science subjects in school at all?

GRIFFITH: So, I loved school. And I loved reading. I loved all aspects of things that I studied in school. I think as I got older-- we moved to a suburb of Atlanta when I was in middle school. As I got older, I really liked-- I had always liked math. But it seemed that math gave you a lot of power because you can figure things out. And being able to quantify things and everything from measurement if you're building a fort, designing something.

As a child, a younger child, I did all the things that girls did back then. Maybe they still do them. The embroidery, sewing. I made clothes for my dolls. I actually grew cotton and made some of my own cloth to make clothes for my dolls.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

GRIFFITH: I knitted. I crocheted. And then as I got older, when I was 12 I took a sewing class. I made most of my own clothes. My parents were not particularly well off. And it was an it was an era that was maybe all-around less consumption than now. But I didn't have a lot of money for extra things. So I learned to sew. And you could get cheap fabric on sale and I could make very creative outfits from sewing.

And so this idea of designing and being quantitative, even when you knit you figure out how to make a pattern in a different way. It's permeated. And I think one of the things I think now is I've always liked making things. And I think an underappreciated, arguably, facet of women going into STEM careers-- because there's so much interest in that now-- is there's a natural creativity and building and making that's very quantitative in doing things like sewing and knitting and crocheting and macrame.

I also did wood shop. I just love making things. But this whole process of conceiving an idea-- getting an idea of something you want to build or make and then coming up with the way to do that, both the tools, but a lot of times there's some quantitative step in that design. Even if it's knitting.

And the ability to capture that there's an intrinsic stage of life. When I'm 12 I'm knitting, when I'm 30 I'm building molecules that are used in regenerative medicine. This idea that you design and build is a very natural engineering bent. Here's the problem. Here's a general tool that could be used to solve that problem. How do we really do it?

So for me, I kind of look back and I think a lot of things from when I was very young up through high school that I do now naturally as I-- I am an engineer who builds things. I build things mainly out of molecules. I build things out of biology. But that intrinsic process of defining something you want to build that has a purpose and going all the way back to first principles to the tools you have to build it and going through some kind of model, design, blueprint process. That's engineering.

And one thing that I'm hoping to spend more time on is really helping people appreciate that it's OK for girls to not go use erector sets. That the process of making a sweater and making it fit to a different size or changing the pattern, that's also an engineering approach. And it's building the kind of skills you need to do the things I do now, which are-- I have a lot of patents and things translated into use that are really hard core mathematical engineering design projects. But they really started with this idea of conceiving of something, even as a small child, and then realizing how to build it through some design, process, pattern, and build process.

INTERVIEWER: Were their mentors along the way too who were important? Or did you find your way?

GRIFFITH: Yeah. So I have a really terrific family. My parents. Of course, my mom in school. My dad was an engineer. He worked for the power company. And my older brother was also tremendously-- he was a Boy Scout, so it was interesting. Back in those days, I was a Girl Scout. And Girl Scouts would go camping in the leader's backyard. Boy Scouts went on jamborees and all kind of great trips.

But my dad became the troop leader and I got to do a lot of things with the Boy Scouts. So I learned a lot of the kind of things that they do outdoors. But my brother was a really-- older brother-- really terrific because he was very adventuresome and fearless, but he also loved teaching. So he would learn something in school, whether-- I remember when he learned, even in college the first time he learned multivariable calculus. He was so excited. He came home and really explained it all to me. I'm three years younger than him. And it was fascinating. And he got really excited about it.

And you're very receptive to learning math. There's not an age particular to learn math. And I think this joy of learning and then applying it to things was just imbued in my family.

And also another important thing is my mom in school, four kids. There were a lot of just things that needed to be done. And everybody had chores. But there were also, especially as I got older, things like the car would break down. My father traveled a fair amount. And whoever was standing in line in our family did the chore. It wasn't girls' chores and boys' chores.

So one time my dad left town and the car died. It turned out the radiator-- he calls. He says, well, you gotta take the radiator out and have it boiled out. And we had this huge old station wagon.

INTERVIEWER: You were how old?

GRIFFITH: Then I must have been at least 16. I must have been 16 because I was old enough to drive. He says, you know, the transmission line goes in the radiator. I loaned the tool to disconnect it to so-and-so down the street. So you gotta go get the wrench for that from him and then you take it out and here's where to take it. And then if it's no good, then you have to go to this place that sells the radiators for stock cars.

And, yeah. So it was this whole thing he just tells me on the phone. And he knows I'll do it. And it's like, we need the car. And so you just-- OK. You just do this.

INTERVIEWER: Did you do that on your own? Or with your brother or--

GRIFFITH: This one I did on my own. My brother, I don't know where-- he wasn't around at that point. So I was just sort of the confidence that-- there was no drama like, is your brother there? It's like, of course you can do this. And I think that really was important because there was an expectation that I could do the same things by and large from a professional standpoint that my brother could.

And so that was really an important thing, I think, in helping me just not feel any kind of pressure about what to do. It was actually socially very different because back then, especially in the South, like when I was in elementary school, girls were not allowed to wear pants to school. And, in fact, one day even though it didn't frequently get that cold where we lived, it was really cold and my mom dressed me in a very cute pants outfit and I got sent home from school. Even though it was like this matching jacket and pants, I got sent home from school in fifth grade. Because girls weren't allowed to wear pants to school.

And we were allowed to go to school barefoot. It's very cute, because we did.

INTERVIEWER: There were other rules.

GRIFFITH: But it had to be in a dress.

[LAUGHTER]

So I think this just kind of just blanket expectation that we could do anything. And again, socially there were things like my father wanted to meet the boys I went out with. And I wasn't allowed to call boys on the phone and things like that. But otherwise, from the expectations in terms of could I fix a car, could I change the brakes or whatever? It was, OK. Of course you can do this. And--

INTERVIEWER: How empowering. Yeah.

GRIFFITH: Yeah. It was incredibly empowering. And you don't realize at the time how empowering that is. We also, when I was in high school my younger brother-- he's six years younger. There was this show called Kung Fu. I don't know if anybody remembers this. But it was very fascinating show back when there were only like two or three TV channels. And about this immigrant from China who practiced Kung Fu and solved all these problems.

And so karate studios grew up in the US. And there was one in our-- we lived in then a suburb, a little town still. And my younger brother wanted to take karate. So everybody in the family ends up taking karate. And it turned out to be really fun. All our siblings did it.

And I really liked it because it was really great. It was exercise, but it was also-- there was a lot of-- you do katas, but you get to fight. And so I ended up going to the karate studio every day except Sundays. And one of my first jobs was teaching karate. And I passed up through, by the time I graduated, half my black belt test.

But it was a really-- again, a very empowering thing. And also I got in really great shape. But it also was mentally good and it was-- I entered tournaments and I fought against boys. And one year I had a crush on this guy and I really wanted him to ask me to prom. He was a guy at my-- and he wasn't paying attention me and we had a sparring match at the karate studio. And I actually knocked him out.

And this really impressed him because he was kind of a cocky guy. He couldn't believe he got knocked out by a girl. So--

[LAUGHTER]

So the freedom to explore and get into trouble and stuff was my generation of growing up. Getting yourself in a little bit of trouble or making mistakes was something parents let kids do. And it's incredibly valuable for later in life.

INTERVIEWER: Given that kind of background, did other of your siblings go into engineering as well? It just sounds like one-- I could really see how that might--

GRIFFITH: Yeah. So my older brother actually ended up going to Georgia Tech and majoring in chemical engineering. He started out as a chemistry major. We had a really fabulous chemistry teacher in high school, Mr. Chapelle. And really inspired us. Also a really great math teacher. And he went to Georgia Tech and he-- back then chemistry majors had to pass certain language requirements because a lot of the chemistry literature was French or German.

So he was taking German. And he really didn't like it. And I took four years of Latin in high school and two years of German. And so I would do his German homework for him because I liked it. But it meant he didn't pass his German class. So he switched his major to chemical engineering because he figured he was never gonna pass his German. And I'm sure there are other reasons, but that was the one from my view that I saw.

And I actually, up until my senior year, thought I would go to school-- I lived reading. And actually Georgia has this governor's honors program.

INTERVIEWER: This is Georgia Tech as well?

GRIFFITH: No, no. Georgia the state for high school students.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, I see.

GRIFFITH: And each school gets to nominate one person in each of the areas that they have for the governor's honors. So it's literature, English, math, drama, music, various categories. And I got nominated in both math and English. And I thought, oh-- back then I thought I would become a writer and so I went in English. And did that for the summer.

It was really fun. It was in Macon, down where Flannery O'Connor-- yeah, so it was a really good summer. I made a lot of really close friends. But my senior year of high school, I took calculus and my math teacher said he thought I could do really a lot better than I was doing. I was sitting in the back of the class gossiping with my friend. And I kind of took it to heart and I really started applying myself and I started realizing that thinking my daily life, I would really miss-- I really enjoyed knowing how things worked. And I really enjoyed math and math was a really calming thing.

I had a lot of drama in my life for family reasons. My mother ended up having a lot of mental health issues. But I also had a lot of health issues. I had a disease-- I have a disease called endometriosis. And I would get very, very ill. It wasn't diagnosed until much, much later. But math was just something you could do and there was an answer. At least back when you were in high school there's always answers in the back of the book.

And it was a really-- I realized how grounding the sciences were because it was something that could never be taken away. You had a skill that-- you started getting to that age and you think about different careers and careers that are based on-- if you're in the hard sciences where there is an answer ostensibly, there's less issues around social things and how you're-- I just kind of started to get this impression that I can be right. And therefore, who could argue. In a way whereas if you're writing or other professions you may have more of a struggle.

INTERVIEWER: It's more subjective.

GRIFFITH: It's more subjective. There's less clear criteria for how you succeed and how you build a career. And I was just thinking-- it appealed to me because I was-- also it was easy to do math. I found it easier than writing.

So by the end of my senior year, I decided to also go to Georgia Tech and major in chemical engineering. Because I loved chemistry and I loved math. And I love making things. Engineers really are about making things. So that's what I did.

And back then it was-- I had to really support myself in college. So going out of state. Georgia Tech, I got a scholar-- I was a National Merit Scholar and they gave every National Merit Scholar a scholarship, which was a huge thing to me to be able to do that. And I, at the time, had gotten an interest in-- my dad made a lot of money. He didn't make a lot of money [INAUDIBLE]. He actually learned how to invest in the stock market. And I would read the magazine-- Forbes and stuff. And I invested my babysitting money in the stock market and actually made enough money to pay for college.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

GRIFFITH: And--

INTERVIEWER: So when you were at Georgia Tech then, you were very clearly on this trajectory in chemical engineering. That was clear.

GRIFFITH: Mmhmm.

INTERVIEWER: And then did you go straight to grad school? Or was there something at Georgia Tech that you would want to talk about that was somehow, I don't know, noteworthy?

GRIFFITH: Yeah, actually. Let me say a few things. First of all, because I couldn't go away to college I really needed to get away from my family situation for a while. So I went to Denmark as an exchange student at a gymnasium. And I lived, I think, with probably the only family in Denmark that didn't speak English. I lived very far from Copenhagen on a farm. And they owned a gravel pit. So that was its own experience.

So I actually-- I did that for six months and I started Georgia Tech in January. And at the time, Tech was not the research powerhouse that it is now. And there were not that many professors who actually had active research programs. It was very focused on undergraduate teaching.

And I was a pre-med. And I really loved-- because I loved biology. I'd taken a human physiology class in high school. And I ended up by the end of my junior year when I took the MCATs, by then I realized how much I loved engineering and that this idea of going to medical school was just sort of-- it was an ill-informed idea because it's like, what do you do? I didn't even know about graduate school.

And so I did really well on the MCATs but I had a kind of-- I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I had been working in the summers for the State of Georgia Department of Natural Resources looking at water quality control. So my partner and I would go test lakes in Georgia for how polluted they were. It was really great because we would go camping and spend the summer outside. There was a little bit of science involved. It was mostly a kind of fun summer job.

And I realized I needed to figure out what to do. So fall of my senior year, you start getting recruited by Exxon and so on. And I got an exam back from a professor and it said, have you thought about going to graduate school? And I hadn't really, but I had been doing some things like-- I had to make extra money, I was a teaching assistant for freshman calculus. And so I went to see the professors and they talked it through. And this sounded like this is really what I want to do because I had, by then, really liked making things. I really wanted to learn how to do research. I got involved in a little research project as an undergraduate.

And so I ended up applying to graduate school. And at the time, Minnesota and Berkeley were really the two top chemical engineering programs. And there was no way I was going to go to Minnesota. And MIT, I decided not to apply to MIT. There was just not even a question because, kind of a silly thing. Number one, I didn't want to go where it snowed. But also Georgia Tech back then was seven to one men to women. And almost all the women were in the management school. So I would be the only woman in a class sometimes.

And you really don't frequently notice it except you do get asked-- I was very cute when I was young. I'm old now. But there just weren't a lot of women. And so it was hard to-- you have a lot of friends. And it was just a weird social situation. So it's like, I'm not going to go to another school for graduates. I want to go to a place that has equal numbers of women and men. And plus I had--

INTERVIEWER: In engineering they had?

GRIFFITH: Well, no. No. I want to go to a school.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, Georgia Tech as the campus.

GRIFFITH: Just the school has-- yeah, the campus.

INTERVIEWER: Right.

GRIFFITH: But I also had gotten very involved. I wrote for the undergraduate newspaper and became editor of the features section. So all the bands and stuff I'd go review them. And I was very involved in music. And so I wanted to see the Dead Kennedys, a band that never came to play Atlanta when I was in school. It's like, OK. I'm going to go to Berkeley.

So I ended up going to Berkeley in chemical engineering. And they had a lot of biotechnology in the chemical engineering department. And so it was a very attractive school. And so I went there right after I graduated.

INTERVIEWER: That was through to the PhD then? At Berkeley?

GRIFFITH: Yes. So I did a PhD at Berkeley.

INTERVIEWER: So then you come to MIT. There's probably stuff in between, or--

GRIFFITH: Yeah. So I did a PhD at Berkeley. And it was a great place to go to graduate school. I got married and then my ex-husband got a job at MIT. And we had a lot of-- he was from California. And we agreed that-- he was ahead of me. That if he moved to MIT-- that if we left California, he would get to pick. So I ended up here and I interviewed for jobs. And it turned out-- it was an era when the biotechnology industry was getting started and they didn't really know quite what engineers did.

INTERVIEWER: This was late '80s, you said?

GRIFFITH: It was the late '80s.

INTERVIEWER: And I didn't mean to short anything--

GRIFFITH: Nope. Nope.

INTERVIEWER: --about Berkeley if you wanted to talk about your time there.

GRIFFITH: No. I enjoyed riding my motorcycle. Made a lot of great friends.

[LAUGHTER]

INTERVIEWER: All right. Yeah. So late '80s at MIT then.

GRIFFITH: Yeah. And so I interviewed for jobs-- so I had actually faculty offers before my ex-husband did. Because I was in a really hot area. And also a lot of schools were interested in hiring women. So I had sort of a lot of things. I was from a really top program, really top lab. I had a research area that was really, really demand.

So I got invited for faculty interviews in my third year of graduate school. And I got offers before my ex-husband did.

INTERVIEWER: Wow.

GRIFFITH: So it was a complicated two-body thing. But we agreed that I would turn down my offers and he would take MIT. And so he came here. And then MIT was the only other school that had really strong biotechnology. So it was clear that if I wanted a faculty job, I was going-- so I agreed, I will do an industry job. And I got a job at Dow Chemical two months before I was done with my thesis. They closed that lab and moved it back to Midland.

So I ended up with no job. But I looked for postdocs and people didn't do postdocs back then. So I ended up finding in the back of Science an ad for a postdoc that Bob Langer had with a transplant surgeon, answered the ad. And I love Bob and I love Jay Vacanti. And it was just great. And so I ended up doing a postdoc. And that's really how I ended up ultimately joining the faculty at MIT because I had a fabulous postdoc experience. Bob is very, very nurturing and Jay Vacanti is an-- both awesome mentors. And really, really opened my eyes to a lot of things. My PhD thesis was in reactor design from mammalian cell culture. This was more medical, the beginnings of tissue engineering.

And so I really got a great experience during the postdoc working over at Harvard Medical School with the surgeons. And got a chance to develop a lot of my own ideas. Bob was growing a very, very big lab and the postdocs had a lot of independence and he expected you to really reach out and learn from other people. So it was a fantastic time.

And then he encouraged me to apply for a faculty position at the end of the postdoc. And so I did that and ended up on the faculty.

INTERVIEWER: Wonderful. And you did some fellowships too? Those are a little bit later, I guess.

GRIFFITH: Mhm.

INTERVIEWER: You had various-- but basically you've been here. And then you've had various collaborations, I'm sure. So this was the beginning of systems biology? Is that what was going on would you say? You said biotechnology, so how was that--

GRIFFITH: So biotechnology was really making therapeutic proteins. Things like EPO making insulin and E. coli. So it was really the start of connecting engineering and biology. And at MIT, Professor Danny Wang, who's an Institute professor, had done this amazing thing. He created an NSF engineering research center called the Biotech Process Engineering Center. And this started in the mid-80s before I was here, but it cast a long shadow because in graduate school I knew about this and I had friends who were part of it.

And it was really a time when he really started initiating connections between engineering and biology to do therapeutic protein production. And so I joined in a program actually with Harvard Medical School and taught at the medical school for a while. But it was a time when the ascendance of understanding biology at a molecular level was-- it was just growing very fast. And once you have a revolution in a basic science-- so you think late 1800s, early 1900s, chemistry became molecular. Now you could predict reactions. So that's how chemical engineering got born. It got born at MIT.

And you think about electrical engineering came from revolutions in physics. Maxwell kind of understanding of physics. And so when biology became molecular, it's only natural that you grow a new kind of engineering out of the underlying science of biology. And so new engineering disciplines come along every few decades, really, because it takes a true revolution.

So the late '80s was before systems biology. But it was kind of really starting to connect engineering and biology. And a whole bunch of us at MIT. So I ended up in chemical engineering, was teaching standard chemical engineering. But a whole lot of people at MIT in different engineering departments, as well as in biology, could see that we needed to be more holistic about the approaches of translating discoveries of biology into things society uses through the prism of engineering.

So we got together an ad hoc committee. We would meet literally over beers on Fridays and talk about what we should be doing. Because other schools were starting biomedical engineering programs. And there was a foundation giving money out to do that. Huge amount of money, actually. And we got together and we decided it was really not appropriate to have a major in biomedical engineering because medical engineering is all kind of engineering applied to medicine. It's sort of like--

INTERVIEWER: More clinical.

GRIFFITH: Yeah, but it's interacting with the industry, whereas doing engineering based in a fundamental science is a discipline. So we proposed-- I was leading the committee by then even though I was an assistant professor. We proposed to have a minor degree in biomedical engineering. It was a MIT's first interdepartmental minor. And MIT said, oh, you can't do this. You're not a department.

And MIT, being very thoughtful-- this was actually a great experience for an assistant professor. Because there's like different committees. Committee on Curriculum, Committee on Undergraduate Programs, Faculty Policy Committee. And there's a process for everything at MIT. And it can be very frustrating, because you want to do something but you gotta go to all these committees.

On the other hand, it's amazing. Because there's an institutional memory of why you do things a certain way. And there's flexibility that if you can argue that, here's why I want to do a new thing, you'll take it through the prism of, here's the things that could go wrong. So when you're a young person who doesn't have that institutional memory, you hear from people who've seen a lot of things. And they can say, well, did you think about this? It's like, no. Yeah. I could see.

And so the process of proposing this interdepartmental minor, it was the first time that had been proposed. And the Institute needed to react. And they actually helped us make it happen. It took a long time.

INTERVIEWER: So there was some push back, or--

GRIFFITH: Of course there was push back. Because there was no mechanism to do an interdepartmental minor. And I learned a lot about the incredible, incredible seriousness with which MIT takes undergraduate-- education in general, but especially undergraduate education. Thinking about experiences of students and the things that could go wrong and if you do something haphazard.

So it was a much longer process. It was a very long-- I had to get by, but it helped me meet people all over the Institute. I got connected, understood how the administration worked at MIT. So it was a fantastic experience. And we got it instituted and it started in 1995 as MIT's first interdepartmental minor. Became the most popular minor within two years, over 80 kids a year.

But it also led to a group of faculty proposing to the administration that we start a whole program connecting modern molecular life science to engineering. And that led to creation, ultimately, of the Department of Biological Engineering.

INTERVIEWER: And the major, yeah.

GRIFFITH: And the undergraduate major.

INTERVIEWER: Wonderful. So you-- other universes weren't quite doing that at the time either.

GRIFFITH: So what was different about MIT and special-- MIT is special in so many ways. First of all, from an intellectual standpoint, other schools had departments of biomedical engineering. So they had electrical engineers or mechanical engineers. Like Hopkins and UCSD and so on who had started to work with clinicians, but not necessarily thinking about biology like, let's make a pulse oximeter. Or an imaging.

So there were things-- a lot of things that engineers can do that don't require biology or much knowledge of biology. Where this was different, very different, was to say the real thing is to think 10 years down the road. So one approach to liver disease is to grow a liver and transplant it into the patient. Another is to figure out the mechanisms that cause liver disease. It's actually an engineering problem, believe it or not.

So our vision was instead of building a machine to correct something that went wrong in the patient or a prosthetic, let's figure out how to prevent it from happening by really bringing a whole new level of understanding and manipulation of the biology that is an engineering appreciation. So it was really this mid-late 90's was when systems biology really got started around this engineering. Understanding biology from a molecular systems level through bringing all the things engineering mindset does to analyze things and then to build things.

So that was really when it got started. But other schools were not really fortunate enough to have the humongous number of faculty. We have a huge engineering school. And a lot of interaction. We also have a long, dark winter and something called the Infinite Corridor. And people just are stuck together.

And we actually also had this really great thing, which has kind of gone by the way. We had a faculty lunch room. And Joel Moses started this when he was-- I think it was Joel Moses. It was this really low-key place over in Walker on the second floor that you could go and for $3 get a very basic lunch. And just picnic tables kind of thing.

INTERVIEWER: Faculty only, did you say?

GRIFFITH: It was faculty only. And it was great because you could run over there after class and in 20 minutes get lunch or you could stay there for an hour, but you met-- it was a chance to talk to people in other departments and just over anything. Because I would go by myself. I'd sit at the table with the chemists. And I got to know a lot about what was going on in chem-- you just learned a lot about other people and what they were doing by I'm just going to sit here and eat my lunch and just, what's going on?

And unfortunately, when they created the R&D, the new one, it didn't really capture. And then they decided to open it to-- it would be great if we could bring that back, because it was a very-- really nice thing. Even though it may seem elitist. But it was a really good thing because you could talk about things with your colleagues in a very low-barrier way.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned the Infinite Corridor too. And I've heard about this. But really did you go out in the hallway and-- how did you-- I know that the departments--

GRIFFITH: Well, the Infinite is-- everything is on the same hallway. So everybody is down the hall. And this was crucial because without going outside in a coat or anything you could literally meet people by just running down the hall to their office. I'm going to come over and talk to you in your office. And in the middle of the afternoon when you're just-- you're frustrated about something, you get up and you take a walk and you stop in and see someone in another department.

And you can do that. And people do that all the time. People just stop in and see each other. Maybe not so much now. Certainly this was done. And that fostering and people-- dark, long winter-- you're kind of forced in together. So it was a really great environment where there was a lot of communication. And so that really helped us.

And the other thing that made it possible is-- things have changed a lot in the past 15 or 20 years. But MIT really values people at all stages of their academic development. It's much more hierarchical now than it was in the past. But there used to be a very thin administration and the idea that your faculty are people that you hired as assistant professors and brought them up through tenure is extremely valued. It's not like Harvard where when somebody's up for tenure you go ask, is there a senior person that we could bring in?

MIT really values bringing people up through the ranks. And they really value that undergraduates and graduate students have enormous things to contribute intellectually and otherwise to the functioning of the Institute. And that you may not have the experience level as someone older than you, but you certainly are capable of that someday. So there is this more valuing the energy, ideas, and so on and people at earlier career stages at MIT than there are at some other schools.

And that makes a lot of things possible. Because grassroots up frequently is very enduring compared to administration level down. Because when people get to-- you bring something up from the grassroots, you have to convince your colleagues that your idea is good. So you figure out the right way to do it because you've gotta really hone your reasons for wanting to do something when there's all these other people wanting to do things too.

So I love that about MIT.

INTERVIEWER: It sounds more collegial in general. You're not looking to-- you're not so-- maybe you're more, I don't know, nurtured. And therefore less, I don't know-- and the whole tenure battle I think must be a difficult one.

GRIFFITH: Well, tenure at MIT, everyone that we hire, we expect to get tenure. So every single person who's hired. There's no weeding out. There's no expectation that we've hired three people, we only have one slot at the tenure level. There's an expectation that every single person who's hired will ultimately get tenure. And there's a sense of failure if they don't. So the department feels like someone-- it is-- at MIT there is a sense that it's a community endeavor to help people develop professionally and become all the things you want an MIT faculty member to be.

And that really was-- I had an amazing experience as-- my tenure process here was fantastic because I had fabulous mentors in many departments. I had an amazing department head, Bob Brown, who's now president of BU. Was just really incredible.

INTERVIEWER: So at this point, you had started the biological engineering major.

GRIFFITH: No--

INTERVIEWER: Are you in a different department now? Are still in--

GRIFFITH: So the brief history of what happened is I started out in the HST program and then resigned from that my third year because it wasn't a fit. I didn't want to be at the medical school. I really needed to build the bridges to biology. And I got hired by the chemical engineering department. Bob Brown was the department head and he had real vision for-- he could see that biology was going to become a discipline, I think.

And so he then hired a whole bunch of us, proposed to the administration to start a research center to kind of bring together these ideas. And we also proposed that we hire a particular person from the outside to come head it. And that was Doug Lauffenburger. And so that started in 1995 and Doug came into chemical engineering and I was in chemical engineering.

And it grew out of this-- we had the interdepartmental curriculum committee. It was just an ad hoc interdepartmental committee that I was chairing. And kind of the idea that we needed a formal academic unit to handle bioengineering came out of this committee. But it started incrementally and in a logical process. So it started as an academic division. And this was Bob Brown and Doug Lauffenburger came up with this idea that we would put half of our appointments into a new kind of academic structure that hadn't been done before.

And this was-- Bob Brown was a very creative dean of engineering. And he said, well, we could do an experiment and see if there's something really there. So we had-- there was a committee that evaluated and assessed, would this be a good idea? How should we go about it? And Bob Armstrong, the Chem E department head chaired it. And they so we had a charter and we had certain expectations. We were going to be reviewed after five to seven years and either could continue as a division, be a department, or get killed.

And it turned out we got reviewed after four years because it was incredibly successful-- we started a graduate program. And it became one of the most competitive in the school of engineering very quickly. Nationally it was the only real biological engineering graduate program. And then our visiting-- MIT-- every department has an external advisory, something called a visiting committee. And they, after they saw the success of the graduate program, said you really need to develop an undergraduate major.

So advised us. And I then led, starting in 2000, a committee to develop an undergraduate major. And then that got launched in 2005. So it was really a process that happened from 1998 when the division started up through-- we actually didn't become a department, I think, until 2006.

INTERVIEWER: And were you also collaborating with other departments more and more? Was that part of--

GRIFFITH: So there's-- a way to think about research at MIT is the-- MIT is organized around academic departments that grant degrees. And so the degree programs are pretty much within departments. But there's all kind of interdepartmental research centers that have people from all different departments participate in programs.

So for example, when Doug Lauffenburger came, he headed an interdepartmental biomedical engineering research center. And this got grants-- we were part of collaborative grants. And this happens all over MIT forever. Two people get together, they write a grant, and you do this. So there's all kind of research collaborations.

And that is not at all unusual. And so I had collaborate-- one of my most seminal-- most important ones as an assistant professor was with a chemical engineering professor named Ed Merrill, one of the real pioneers in biomaterials. I didn't know that much polymer science. He really taught me polymer science. Amazing guy. My first student was co-advised with him.

And so there were research collaborations where you learned something or put two things together with other people. But there were a lot of teaching collaborations because we started out with not enough faculty to do the major. And there was a real humongous set of teaching collaborations.

INTERVIEWER: And in fact, let's talk about teaching and your experience about teaching the MIT student. Was that because you've been recognized with your-- with a MacVicar Faculty Award because of your passion in teaching undergraduates. Has that been something that you are continuing to do?

GRIFFITH: Oh, yeah. You shouldn't be at MIT pretty much if you don't enjoy teaching because-- and it's interesting. The creation of the undergraduate major is partly because if you were pushing a research frontier, whatever you really learned you bring into the classroom and teach other people how to do it. And so teaching is a synthesis of what you've really learned. Even though now I teach a very-- I teach thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which has been around for a long time.

But it's always changing because the applications change and the way the kind of tools we use to study it and apply it and measure things change. So you bring that into the classroom. So teaching-- MIT students are amazing. You always learn from them. And anyone at MIT will pretty much tell you this. That you learn stuff. And it's incredibly enriching for the research program to teach a class, especially to undergraduates. Because you can't explain it to them. You don't understand it.

And by teaching things that are outside your comfort zone, as it was-- when we started the new major I had to-- we needed a thermo class. And I ended up developing it. And it was an incredibly wonderful experience. We teach now-- or we ended up teaching jointly with the chemistry department for a while. And it's been great. Several research projects got launched out of teaching together with chemistry.

In fact, one of the project-- Moungi Bawendi is a chemistry professor. We started a small project funded by the cancer center. And it's now in clinical trials to do better resection of tumors during breast cancer surgery. And amazing small circle. The project actually--the person leading the clinical trials is actually the surgeon who did my breast cancer surgery five years ago.

So it's actually doing very well. So it's kind of amazing. And it completely grew out of a teaching collaboration. And we would not have started that project if we hadn't been teaching together. And we just learned about each other. And then we had a chance to just try this idea. And here we are. Together started a company and now it's actually going to be-- I know exactly why we need this technology to help women who are having breast cancer surgery.

INTERVIEWER: I want to get to that. I want to hear more about that. But I want to talk about-- so you have your personal experiences and health issues. You mentioned earlier endometriosis. And I'd like to talk about what-- how did you decide to do this research center in gynepathology? And what was involved in getting that put together?

GRIFFITH: Yeah. So I currently direct a center that has an unusual name. In fact, my surgery collaborator, who's fantastic, one of the best gynecology surgeons in the world, extremely renowned. He's like, gynepathology, we can't call it that. That's not even a word. And we did a Google search. There were only three hits and none of them were from English-speaking countries.