Earl Bakken (1924-2018)

Earl Bakken. From the Bakken Museum, via wikipedia.

Earl Bakken, cofounder of the medical device company Medtronic, died Sunday at the age of 94. In 1957 he developed the first external, battery-operated artificial pacemaker. Russ Hobbie and I don’t mention Bakken by name in Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology, but we do discuss pacemakers.

Cardiac pacemakers are a useful treatment for certain heart diseases. The most frequent are an abnormally slow pulse rate (bradycardia) associated with symptoms such as dizziness, fainting (syncope), or heart failure. These may arise from a problem with the SA node (sick sinus syndrome) or with the conduction system (heart block). One of the first uses of pacemakers was to treat complete or third degree heart block. The SA node and the atria fire at a normal rate but the wave front cannot pass through the conduction system. The AV node or some other part of the conduction system then begins firing and driving the ventricles at its own, pathologically slower rate…. A pacemaker stimulating the ventricles can be used to restore a normal ventricular rate.

In the 1950s, famed cardiac surgeon Dr. Walt Lillehei was at the University of Minnesota, where he met Bakken. Kirk Jeffrey tells the story of their collaboration in Machines In Our Hearts.

Machines In Our Hearts, by Kirk Jeffrey

The myocardial pacing wire was the first electrical device ever to be implanted in the human body and left there for a period of time. Surgeons at Minnesota were now able to pace children for days or weeks after heart surgery. By October 1957, they had used the technique with 18 patients. But Lillehei now grew uneasy about the Grass stimulator because it was bulky and plugged into the electrical system. The surgeon wanted to get his heart patients out of bed and moving around, but the stimulator had to accompany them on a wheeled cart. The electrical cord was a further nuisance. ‘‘Many of these [patients] were kids. They wanted to wander around and get active. Well, they were active. They couldn’t go any further than the cord. We had to string wires down the hall. . . . And then, if they needed an X ray or something that couldn’t be done in the room, you couldn’t get on the elevator so you had to string them down the stairwells. It seemed that almost everything you wanted was on a different floor. We needed something battery-operated.’’

From Machines In Our Hearts.

The plug-in stimulator was more than an inconvenience, for by introducing the myocardial pacing wire, Lillehei and his associates had connected the hearts of their surgical patients to the 110-volt electrical system of the hospital. Everyone in the program knew that an electrical surge might send patients into ventricular fibrillation or that a power outage could leave them without pacemaker support. On October 31, 1957, an equipment failure at a large Twin Cities power plant caused an outage lasting nearly three hours in Minneapolis. The University hospital had auxiliary power in its surgical suites and recovery area, but not in patients’ rooms. None of his heart patients died—but Lillehei viewed the event as a warning. Lillehei…turned to Earl Bakken…a young engineer who owned a small medical electronics business called Medtronic and repaired and serviced equipment for the Department of Surgery.

Bakken…realized that he could simply build a stimulator that used transistors and small batteries. ‘‘It was kind of an interesting point in history,’’ he recalled—‘‘a joining of several technologies.’’ In constructing the external pulse generator, Bakken borrowed a circuit design for a metronome that he had noticed a few months earlier in an electronics magazine for hobbyists. It included two transistors. Invented a decade earlier, the transistor was just beginning to spread into general use in the mid-1950s. Hardly anyone had explored its applications in medical devices. Bakken used a nine-volt battery, housed the assemblage in an aluminum circuit box, and provided an on-off switch and control knobs for stimulus rate and amplitude.

At the electronics repair shop that he had founded with his brother-in-law in 1949, Bakken had customized many instruments for researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School…When Bakken delivered the battery-powered external pulse generator to Walt Lillehei in January 1958, it seemed to the inventor another special order, nothing more. The pulse generator was hardly an aesthetic triumph, but it was small enough to hold in the hand and severed all connection between the patient’s heart and the hospital power system. Bakken’s business had no animal-testing facility, so he assumed that the surgeons would test the device by pacing laboratory dogs. They did ‘‘a few dogs,’’ then Lillehei put the pacemaker into clinical use. When Bakken next visited the university, he was surprised to find that his crude prototype was managing the heartbeat of a child recovering from open-heart surgery.

The Bakken Museum. From wikipedia.

Russ Hobbie is retired from the University of Minnesota, and still lives in the area, so he is particularly familiar with Earl Bakken. He served on the board of the Bakken Museum, which is devoted to bioelectricity (my kind of museum). Russ say he ‘‘was impressed by Bakken's vision, energy, and desire to help people. The Bakken Museum has an extensive outreach program which does a lot of good things.’’ They recently posted a statement honoring their founder.

Medtronic is one of the largest medical device companies. I had a job interview there years ago, but I didn’t get the position. I came away impressed by the company, and wish I had bought stock.

Bakken is a member of the dwindling greatest generation; he was an airborne radar maintenance instructor during World War II. He had a long, full life, and we will miss him.

Below are a couple of videos about Earl Bakken. Enjoy!