Bakken Symposium Lecture Series

The Pacemaker and the Birth of a Medical Device Industry

The symposium honors the work and life of Earl E. Bakken, an electrical engineer who maintained the electrical equipment used by the Department of Surgery, during some of the first open heart surgeries performed anywhere in the world.

In 1957, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei needed to pace the hearts of post-surgical patients eliciting heart block, they began by using a Grass stimulator plugged into the wall.  After a power failure in the hospital and a young child being supported by a Grass nearly died. Dr. Lillehei asked Earl to develop a backup system, Earl then went on to develop/invented the battery operated, wearable pacemaker of which Dr. Lillehei used the preclinical device on one of his patients the same day of the first animal study. Dr. Lillehei and Medtronic worked together for the next decade to identify the clinical uses of such pacing systems. Demand for these products became so high that Bakken and his brother-in-law, Palmer Hermundslie, changed the business model of Medtronic, from a hospital equipment repair company to one building pacemakers.  

The collaboration between cardiac surgery, Medtronic, and electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota became the basis for the birth of a new global medical device industry.