A dozen teens snake through the circuitous hallways of a hospital in the massive Texas Medical Center. At the head of the line is a prominent cardiovascular surgeon, leading the group to their next lecture. They wind through the corridors, turn by turn, and file through the lab door. The group is composed of local high school students from an advanced anatomy class, and they’re at the medical center for a long-awaited field trip. They’re all seniors—all but one.
The lone sophomore in the group had pleaded to get into this class. He was clearly capable, but the teacher had hesitated because of his age. Undaunted, Christopher Bettinger talked his way in. He wouldn’t take no for an answer because he had a plan. He was going to be a physician. He’d known this for years. Particularly talented at math and science, it was an ideal career path to channel his interests.
Bettinger’s father holds a PhD in microbiology, his mother, an MS in biology, so his interests came naturally. He enjoyed tinkering with household items like his mother’s old radio and his older brothers’ discarded car stereos. “It was almost like Legos—here’s a transistor, here’s a vacuum tube. I took stuff apart all the time. If you get immersed in the fields of science or engineering, it’s just normal.”
The Bettinger’s youngest child was the last of three boys, born five years after his middle brother. His parents found him personable, easygoing, and modest by nature, as well as quietly determined and shockingly organized. Playing catch-up to his siblings only spurred the youngster to work harder. “He would say, ‘Well, between studying English and math, I’ve allotted a few minutes for a break.’ This was in the fourth grade!” recalls his father, George. Still, the plan Bettinger concocted for his high school education surprised them all.
When he was entering sixth grade, the family settled in Lake Jackson, Texas. They had barely unpacked when the 12-year-old picked up the local newspaper. His eyes latched onto an article featuring a recent graduate of the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science. It was a selective boarding program allowing high school juniors to complete their secondary schooling at the University of North Texas, earning at least a year of college credit. The program was 280 miles away. “He said, ‘Mom, that’s what I’m going to do,’” recalls his mother, Anne, who hoped it would be a passing whim, so she and her husband wouldn’t become empty nesters too soon. But by Bettinger’s sophomore year of high school his plan hadn’t wavered, and he and his mom were wading through the application process.
The advanced anatomy class at his local school fit right into his plans. Bettinger was easily handling the assignments, and he had looked forward to their spring field trip to the world-class medical complex. He particularly enjoyed the surgeon’s earlier lecture that day in the conference room. He loved the plastic organ models, all the mechanical “Lego” parts that he loved to piece together. “Oh, that’s cool.” There were the valves in the heart model, just like they’d learned in class. “Fantastic.” He was excited for the rest of the tour. The real thing should prove even more fascinating.
Entering the cadaver lab for the next demonstration, Bettinger is immediately struck by the smell. It’s overwhelming. The suffocating odor of formaldehyde permeates the eerie room. Everything seems to be made of stainless steel—except for the subject on the table. Bettinger can’t take his eyes off the pale, lifeless body on the metal slab. It has been cut into pieces by what must have been a parade of medical students. The surgeon scoops the cadaver’s heart out of its chest and begins to mimic what he just showed the students in plastic. He’s just getting started, but Bettinger has seen enough. He flees the lab, grabs a bench in the hallway, and passes out. His shocked teacher races out to help him. She remembers the incident to this day. So does Bettinger. “That was the end of my medical career.”
It means an adjustment in the plan, but to Bettinger, it’s just “a banked turn.” He loves science, loves mechanical things. So he won’t save humanity as a physician. No problem—he’ll create the next medical miracle as a biomedical engineer. Bettinger soon learns he has been accepted to the Texas Academy and heads off toward Dallas in the fall. He’s just 16. He finishes at the top of his class and moves on to MIT to begin undergraduate study, starting as a sophomore. He enrolls as a chemical engineer, a seemingly strange choice, but it’s all part of the plan. After months of discussion with his father—the elder resorting to data-based arguments—Bettinger concedes. In 1999, biomedical engineering was still a fledgling academic discipline. A more fundamental degree would provide the best career foundation.
During his undergraduate years in chemical engineering, he develops a fascination for polymers, a type of molecule with repeating structural units, generally plastics. He also takes off a semester to work for Texas Instruments and learn about microfabrication, the construction of miniaturized structures. After graduation, basics behind him, he moves and starts to work on his MS degree in biomedical engineering and PhD in materials science, purposely “ping-ponging” between fields to soak up more specialized knowledge through a variety of “different lenses.” Through it all, he remains focused on creating and working with polymers.
“I always liked making things,” explains Bettinger. “I look at polymers as this large sandbox. It’s the diversity of properties you can achieve, the neat things you can do with them, things like shape memory and twisting. I’m still building things, but on a micro scale.”
Bettinger’s graduate research involves creating “biodegradable scaffolding materials for human tissue engineering.” Currently, the best method for replacing a person’s damaged tissue or organ is a graft from a donor—living, cadaver, or even animal. Problems include availability, disease, and compatibility. Tissue engineering, Bettinger’s chosen field, involves the lab creation of biological tissue substitutes that rely on scaffolds, which work much the same way as construction scaffolds, providing supportive structure for growing tissue. Once scaffolds serve their purpose, their biodegradability allows them to dissolve within the body with no need for removal.
Bettinger’s scaffold work combines biomedical engineering with micro-scale fabrication. Because of this, he collaborates with both academic faculty and staff at Draper Laboratory, a non-profit with expertise in microfabrication. As a funded Draper Fellow, he has an advisor both at MIT and at the lab. One day, his Draper advisor, Jeffrey Borenstein, calls an informal meeting. Funding proposals are due, and he’d like to air potential ideas. There are a number of projects going on in two primary areas. Bettinger’s area involves biodegradable polymers—soft-tissue replacements that can degrade at specified intervals. Another area involves hard silicon chips that can be implanted in the body and controlled electronically.
Four researchers gather around the conference table: Bettinger, Borenstein, and two other staff members. Project ideas bounce around the room. Says Bettinger, “We had this soft-materials world, which I was working on, with a certain set of properties but nothing else. Then we had this silicon world with all these interesting capabilities but no biodegradability. We had these completely disconnected proposals. I remember thinking, ‘This is terrible, just different things smashed together. How do we merge them?’”
As ideas ricochet, something comes into focus for Bettinger. Why not use the biodegradable devices, the mechanical support structures for tissue growth, and turn them into smart, electronic mechanisms? Into dissolvable devices that can sense things and use logic and processing? “Like computer chips that can perform a function and then disappear,” he suggests.
The possibilities are staggering. Such devices could be implanted in the body, be electronically controlled to dispense medication, and then just dissolve away. Or perhaps they could be implanted as sensors to monitor wound healing, then disappear, eliminating the need for removal with invasive surgery.
Bettinger’s excitement is tempered with caution. He’s considered many ideas throughout the years. The hard part is determining their potential viability. He and Borenstein schedule a meeting with Bettinger’s academic advisor, Robert Langer, to discuss the new concept. A few weeks later, Bettinger and Borenstein enter the campus building and head to Langer’s third-floor office. They walk in and sit at the conference table, waiting for Langer to appear.
Langer is a renowned scientist, widely acclaimed as a tissue-engineering pioneer. Needless to say, he’s an exceptionally busy man, but he doesn’t keep them waiting for long. He bursts in, no doubt coming from another important meeting, but he makes time for Bettinger and Borenstein because he always says he’s on the lookout for the next innovation in medical technology. Bettinger begins to tell Langer what he has in mind. Before long, Langer stands and begins to pace. He starts to throw out possible uses as his mind whirs—drug delivery, smart monitoring, and more. “This was definitely a big moment,” recalls Borenstein.
It’s also the beginning of Bettinger’s revised plan. He earns his PhD while the team moves forward with a patent on the biodegradable electronics concept. All they need now is the additional knowledge necessary to make the concept a reality. Bettinger secures a post-doc appointment at Stanford to learn more about polymer electronics. The end result is a breakthrough. He creates polymers that are partially biodegradable, yet functional as transistors, even after exposure to water. “Chris was the one who made it happen. He actually went in the lab and figured out how to make this work,” says Borenstein. It’s a critical first step, and though significant research lies ahead before potential product development, progress is real.
Borenstein isn’t surprised. He knows that his young colleague has an ability to “zero in” on goals, advancing innovation while many of his peers are just getting started. “He’s a rare combination,” says Borenstein. “Very easy to get along with, yet also very focused. He gets difficult tasks done faster than anyone I know—the opposite of that little kid in the ‘Family Circle’ cartoon with dashed lines running all over the neighborhood. There’s no wasted energy. He’s like a laser.”
Bettinger believes that for his research to reach its full potential, he needs a place where there’s no chance he’ll be pigeonholed, where his ideas will not be confined by boundaries. For that reason, he accepts a faculty appointment at Carnegie Mellon. “CMU is really the only place that this could work. We have these new ideas, it’s very interdisciplinary. As opposed to a traditional university with discrete empires patched together like a quilt, this is more like an interconnected web, a network of excellent investigators. That’s why I’m here.”
Bettinger now has his own lab and his own multidisciplinary graduate students hard at work “at the interface of biomaterials, organic electronics, and microfabrication.” In particular, he’s striving to advance the soft, biodegradable materials themselves while he continues to research the electronics. He’s typically optimistic about the myriad of potential uses for the polymers he’s termed “adaptive medical devices.” Consider a not-too-distant future where a cancer patient could be implanted with a biodegradable, miniature pharmacy. The device could be timed to leak scheduled chemotherapy treatments and then simply disappear when therapy is complete. And with added electronic capability, who knows? A physician may implant diabetic patients with a device triggered from outside the body, ready to deliver insulin just when needed. With its supply exhausted, it could just dissolve away.
The scientific community has taken note of Bettinger’s pioneering research, which he hopes will have tangible results within five to ten years. In fact, for his “transformative” work, Technology Review Magazine recently selected Bettinger, now 30, as one of the world’s 35 top innovators under the age of 35. And, on April 30, at the 149th NAS annual meeting in Washington, D.C., he will receive the NAS Award for Initiatives in Research for his next-generation implanted medical devices.
Melissa Silmore (TPR’85) is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to this magazine.
Related Links:
Carnegie Mellon's Christopher Bettinger Receives National Acadamy of Sciences' Research Award
National Acadeny of Sciences honors CMU professor Christopher Bettinger
Christopher Bettinger, 30, Tailoring Polymers for Biodegradable Implants
