It turns out the name (or face) of Dean Kamen may not be etched in stone.
We got great feedback on Arundhati Parmar’s list of people she’d place on the Mount Rushmore of med tech. Her choices: Medtronic’s Earl Bakken, the original medical device regulator Dr. Royal Copeland, kidney dialysis creator Willem Kolff and Dean Kamen, creator of the first wearable diabetes insulin pump and the Segway PT.
Some of you begged to differ.
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“How does Dean Kaman get on the Medical Device monument before Tom Fogarty?” asked one commenter.
“Agree,” wrote another. “Kamen is a very smart guy who gets a lot of press, but Med-Tech-wise is not even in the same league with Mann, Fogarty (and Amplatz, Cope, Simpson, Abele, Auth and numerous others!).”
So below is another version of Mount MedTech: yours. Based on that feedback, we’ve taken out two of the names from Arundhati’s Mount Rushmore and added two of the more popular votes.
Some other reader nominees who did not make the list: Boston Scientific founder John Abele and cardiac device innovator Dr. Kurt Amplatz.
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Alfred Mann
You were loud and clear on this one.
He’s largely funded 17 companies, some of which were sold into the hands of Medtronic, St. Jude Medical and Boston Scientific. His companies have touched everything from diabetes to cardiovascular disease to cancer to neurology. And he has biomedical engineering institutes at three universities. That’s not bad for a physicist with no formal business training.
Alfred E. Mann is a physicist-turned-medtech-entrepreneur-turned philanthropist. He founded his first aerospace company in 1956, but changed his path in the 1960s when Johns Hopkins University asked him to help apply space technology to the pacemaker. In the end, he spun off a company, Pacesetter Systems, which developed the first commercially available rechargeable and implantable pacemaker and is now owned by St. Jude Medical.
During the early 1990s, Mann turned his attention to a new company, MiniMed, which delivered what is now a successful line of insulin pumps and glucose monitors in the Medtronic Diabetes portfolio.
At the age of 86, he’s still CEO and chairman of MannKind Corp., which is developing an inhaler for treatment of diabetes that has been dealt some setbacks by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration but could be available by 2013.
The Alfred Mann Foundation, a medical research initiative focused on developing technological advances to improve the health of people with debilitating medical conditions, has helped produce technology for the first cochlear implant and the first implantable microstimulator.
Thomas Fogarty
In the 1940s, he was just a high school student working as a scrub technician in a Cincinnati hospital. In 2001, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the balloon embolectomy catheter he developed at home during his time at medical school.
After Thomas Fogarty (1934 – present) sold the license to Edwards Lifescience, the catheter, which allows a balloon to be inserted and inflated in a patient’s artery to help remove a blockage, went on to revolutionize vascular surgery and become the industry standard for blood clot removal.
Along with a research team, he helped develop many other balloon devices used in laparoscopy-assisted surgeries, acquiring more than 100 surgical patents and serving as the founder or board member of more than 30 medical device companies along the way.
A former cardiovascular surgeon and professor at the Stanford University Medical School, Fogarty also co-founded an early stage medical device venture firm, Three Arch Partners. His partners gave him the boot in 2004, but he went on to found the Fogarty Institute for Innovation in Silicon Valley, where physician innovators help budding healthcare entrepreneurs prepare their products for commercialization. (Oh, and in his spare time he owns and runs a Bay Area winery.)
Earl Bakken
No tribute to the medical device industry can be complete without a nod to Bakken. Bakken (1929 – present) developed the first battery-operated, transistorized, wearable artificial pacemaker in 1957, thereby cementing his and his company’s (Medtronic) place in the annals of the medical device industry.
He and his brother-in-law founded Medtronic in a garage in northeast Minneapolis to repair medical equipment. But their interaction with Dr. Walt Lillehei at the University of Minnesota hospital led them to design an alternative to the large, external pacemakers which Lillehei used to stabilize children following corrective heart surgery.
And thus the paperback book-sized pacemaker was born.
Willem Kolff
It’s no joke. Sausage casings can actually saves lives. That was one of the elements that Dutchman Willem Kolff (1911-2009), who immigrated to the U.S. in 1950, used to build the original kidney dialysis machine in wartime Holland.
But Kolff is not only known as being the foremost innovator in hemodialysis. He is also a pioneer in the field of artificial organs and is known as the father of artificial organs, having developed the first artificial ear and eye, and inspired the first artificial heart.
An inventor for life, he is also credited with building the intra aortic balloon pump and making an important contribution to the development of the heart-lung machine while at Cleveland Clinic. Later he went to the University of Utah, where Kolff was a distinguished professor emeritus of bioengineering, surgery and medicine, until his death.
Kolff, who won numerous awards recognizing his contributions during his 97 years, had the quintessential trait of a visionary and innovator — in the pursuit of improving the human condition, he was able to imagine the impossible through the possible.
Chris Seper and Arundhati Parmar contributed to this story.
