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David Putnam
"I’m a lot better scientist than I would have been a doctor," says Putnam, now an assistant professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering. "I know it sounds cheesy, but I really love science. And I love this place—it’s a great department, my colleagues are fantastic, and they’re starting a top-notch biomedical engineering program. I want to be part of that. And I love the thrill of just doing some good science and having some good students enjoy it as well. I was trained by some fantastic mentors, and I think it’s my responsibility to give some of that back." After starting TransForm Pharmaceuticals, a Boston-based drug development company, Putnam helped to design a DNA delivery system to fight human papilloma virus infection, now in Phase II clinical trials. In other work, he designs high-throughput combinatorial approaches to rapidly identify conditions that stabilize pharmaceutical systems. The same technology is used to "synthetically evolve" artificial viruses to carry therapeutic genes to cells. Outside the office, he works out as a triathlete and thinks that the thing these two passions have in common is his stubbornness. "In research, there’s a good part to being stubborn and a bad part to being stubborn," says Putnam, who races with his wife Kathy, a grad student in pharmacoepidemiology at Harvard. "When everyone else has given up, it’s the stubborn person who will make the breakthrough. You just have to realize when enough is enough, that you’ve been banging your head against the wrong wall. So you learn to take a little turn, bang on a different wall for a while, till you find what you’re looking for." |
Growing up on his family’s dairy farm in upstate New York, David Putnam decided to become a doctor, starting with a degree in pharmacy. But instead of going to med school, he continued with a PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry and a post-doc at MIT, where he worked on delivery systems for gene-based drugs and quickly changed careers.