Name: Nevin Summers (STS 1967; ISEF 1965-1967)Job Title: Executive Director of the MIT Center for Synthetic BiologyAbout Nevin: Nevin currently serves as the Executive Director of the MIT Center for Synthetic Biology, where he is responsible for fostering collaborations between academia and industry, including start-ups and corporate-sponsored research. He works closely with multidisciplinary Synthetic Biologists who combine insights in computer science, DNA engineering, gene editing and directed evolution to iteratively design, build, test and improve beneficial bio-molecules, viruses, cells, organisms, and ecologies and can offer transformative, renewable, sustainable and socially just solutions to critical unmet global social challenges Education: B.S. in Molecular Biology from Johns Hopkins University, M.Arch. from Harvard University, and an S.M. in Technology Management from MIT.
What does leadership mean to you?
A leader faces a particularly daunting challenge. In order to motivate others to take the risk of doing anything with you, you must first convince them of your integrity, competence, reliability, mastery of the facts and analysis relevant to your proposition and, above all, your clear passion and commitment to achieving a primary objective that resonates with their values and aspirations. For me, learning to be a leader was doing it. My training as an architect and project manager, and the economics of the Boston construction boom, offered me the opportunity to jump into the deep end of the pool and learn how to swim. I had to train myself on how to finish one project while marketing the next.
As the world faces a pandemic, climate disaster and a number of other scientific challenges, what are some steps you think the Society can take to address science literacy and support for science?
The validity of modern science itself is being questioned, even while the benefits of modern technology are taken for granted without any thought to the many scientific principles that underlie its existence and operation. Everyone expects their iPhone to work. The fact that centuries of science preceded it is ignored.
The Science Society, through its distinguished 100-year history, mission and achievements in science journalism, competitions and other educational outreach programs, stands in stark contrast to these untenable views. What else can the Society do to protect science?
I wish we had more politicians in government trained in STEM. This would raise the level of discourse dramatically. For example, ISEF could have a new category: “Science and Technology Policy.” There are many important policy issues (and future career opportunities) here for students to research – they are often featured in the Society’s Science News magazine.
What is the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
Archimedes famously said, “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.” The place I have chosen to stand and dare to make the world better is in a Synthetic Biology laboratory at MIT, and the lever I have chosen is the ability to read and write genetic code in DNA and then put that DNA into the living cell genome to program a new and useful biological function. As an Architect registered in Massachusetts, I focus on biological design. Instead of choosing concrete, steel and glass to build non-living structures like skyscrapers, I have chosen DNA, RNA and protein to build living structures like genetically engineered cells for transplant therapy or for the production of antibodies and other therapeutic proteins. The basic engineering principles of abstraction, standardization, modularity and systems analysis are applicable to both inanimate and animated areas of design.
The most fulfilling aspects of my job, now that the MIT buildings are open again, are in-person lab meetings and just sitting at my desk in a large cubicle farm and talking to nearby grad students and postdocs about the experiments they’re doing in the lab down the hall. It’s really nice to see their growth as scientists and engineers, and help them whenever I can.
Is there a book that has had an impact on your life? What is the name of the book and what effect did it have?
Many books have had an impact on my life. I will mention two: one that has kept me optimistic during the pandemic and another that convinced me fifty years ago to change my career completely from molecular biology to architecture.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress by Steven Pinker (2018):
I started reading this book just before the pandemic started. Steven Pinker argues that the existential condition of mankind has improved significantly over the past 300 years. Reading the “long view” presented in this book was and is a great comfort to me, especially in the early days of COVID-19 when the death count was increasing exponentially, and it was not we have no diagnostics, prophylactic vaccines or therapeutics available. All we got were face masks, hand washing and social distancing – the same methods used during the 1918 flu pandemic when over 50 million died worldwide.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that we are. We have PCR and immunodiagnostics, several types of vaccines including those made from mRNA as well as antibody and small molecule therapeutics. Governments are more responsive to the needs of their citizens. Nothing will ever be perfect, but the quality of life is constantly improving. We will discover and implement solutions to the many challenges that lie ahead. STEM literate citizens will lead the way.
The second book I mentioned is Scope of Total Architecture by Walter Gropius (1943). In the book, the author presents his philosophy of architecture in the service of society. The architect is a co-ordinator, a person of vision and professional competence “whose business is to unite the many social, technical, economic and artistic problems that arise in connection with building.”
At the age of 23, I stood at a crossroads in my career. I received my B.S. in molecular biology, worked in a laboratory at Stanford Medical School, and was accepted to the Ph.D. Program at Stanford Biology. The Vietnam War was horrific. I had been doing science since I was 14 and felt burnt out.
This book sparked my interest in training to be an architect. The more I explored the career, the more I realized I could leverage my STEM skills and develop that personal humanistic foundation I was looking for. I moved to Boston and enrolled in night school at the Boston Architectural Center, but eventually had difficulty finding work during the recession of 1974. As luck would have it, I met Walter Gropius’s widow, Ise, who hired me as a part-time gardener. and, ultimately, as an assistant organizing all of Walter’s architectural photographs, letters, publications and press clippings. I did this for nine years until her death in 1983. She was an amazing person and a mentor to me.
Did you have a favorite mentor as a young person? What difference did that person make in your life and your approach to problem solving?
There are far too many to name so I will mention the first one that got me hooked on doing research. My first science class was in 1962 in the eighth grade and was taught by Mrs. Nelle Norman. One day, she introduced us to the scientific method. This excited me! Growing up in Florida with its diverse flora and fauna, I was always curious about what crawling creatures I could find by turning over a rotting log in the woods near my home. Apart from simply looking at living specimens in the wild, I knew nothing about them, except what I could find in an encyclopedia. Suddenly, I was empowered to stimulate my curiosity by generating hypotheses, designing experiments/controls and generating data on my own. My passive observation position changed forever when Mrs. Norman lectures on the scientific method as the essential tool for mankind to better understand the universe, and, as we will discover later, to inform the many personal decisions that one makes in life.
