WILSON GREATBATCH: INVENTOR OF THE IMPLANTABLE WILSON PACEMAKER

by

R. J.. Reiman, Historian

Wilson Greatbatch is the inventor of the first successful implantable cardiac pacemaker. He was born September 6, 1919, in Buffalo, New York, is married with five children and six grandchildren. He graduated from Cornell with a BSEE degree in 1950, and is a recipient of an award from the National Inventor's Hall of Fame. He can speak English, French, German and can read technical journals in Russian. His pet peeve is with the regulating agency of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Greatbatch met William C. Chardack, chief of surgery at Buffalo's Veterans Administration Hospital, at a meeting of doctors and electrical engineers who were interested in medicine and biology, and thereby he found a surgeon who was interested in an implantable pacemaker. Paul Zoll had made the first practical pacemaker in 1952, but it was the size of a table radio, and was an external device. Earl Bakken developed a hand-held external pacemaker that was powered with batteries. In 1956, silicon transistors became available and Greatbatch, working for a doctor, made an oscillator with one transistor to aid in recording of fast heart sounds. The oscillator required a 10-k ohm resistor, but he mistakenly substituted a 1-k ohm one and found the circuit was the one that was needed to drive the human heart, since the circuit was self-starting, and would remain constant despite drop in battery voltage. This innovation proved to be successful.

On May 7,1958, Greatbatch brought Chardack the world's first implantable cardiac pacemaker for implant on a dog's heart. When the heart was exposed to the two pacemaker's wires, it beat in synchrony with the device. Chardack remarked. "Well I'll be damned"!

Greatbatch remarked in his diary in 1959, "I seriously doubt if anything I ever do will ever give me the elation--when my electronic design controlled a living heart". Greatbatch goes on to say "We were pretty naive about early pacemaker designs. We thought that wrapping the module in electrical tape would seal it". He soon found out that the slightest void in the wrapping would allow fluid to enter and short-out the device. Epoxy covering would extend the survival time to four months.

The pacemakers were manufactured by Medtronics, with Chardack "selling" them to the medical profession through papers, case reports, and personal recommendations. For a foreign device to be left in the body by a surgeon was anathema to him, but the pacemaker would be a life enhancer, rather than a life saver and was low risk. Anything was better than nothing. The body itself, warm, wet and saline, would be more demanding as an environment than the deep ocean or outer space.

Parts for the pacemaker were rigidly tested, especially the transistors, and were subjected to on-line tests in dry ice or to heat soaks at 125 degrees C for 500 hours. Greatbatch's wife Eleanor, a former home economics teacher, administered the shock test of the transistor by taping it with a pencil in the Greatbatch bedroom in Clarence, New York. About 30 percent of the transistors were winnowed out, and none of those that passed ever failed in a pacemaker. Despite the pains taken to ensure reliability of components, many patients died during the early years of artificial pacemaking due to the reactions to the difficult surgery of the first implant, or repeated replacements. Later, surgeon Chardack would refine the existing technique in which a lead with a spring coil was inserted through a vein into the interior of the heart, and open heart surgery was avoided. Now, a pacemaker could be implanted under local anesthesia, but still a problem remained.

Due to limited battery life, pacemakers were only lasting an average of two years with the zinc-mercury battery that had been developed during World War II. Greatbatch went beyond his original training to develop better batteries. Nuclear batteries using plutonium 238 were tried, but their toxicity made them undesirable, In the early 70's, Greatbatch and his colleagues at Hittman Corp. of Columbia, Md. adapted a lithium iodine battery which had been invented by Allan Schneider, to the high reliability demands of pacemakers. Greatbatch's confidence in this battery was so great that he created a company to manufacture them. Today, the $30 million company, run by his son Warren, sells over 90 percent of the pacemakers batteries! The lithium battery has been called the most significant improvement for pacemakers since its invention. Since the battery does not produce gas as had previous batteries, the pacemaker with this battery could be hermetically-sealed in a metal canister, and thereby operate in a dry, moisture-free environment. The lithium battery extended the life to 10 years!

During his career, Greatbatch's curiosity has lured him into projects on bone growth simulation, electronic control of infection, creating orange trees impervious to frost damage, and most recently to AIDS. He also successfully developed a hybrid poplar tree during the energy crisis as an alternate fuel to oil. The end of the oil crisis and state environmental rulings put a damper on his efforts. He did, however, give cloned flowers to friends including a miniature rose under 7 mm in diameter which he had cultivated in a test tube, and named "Rosemary Cloney". With John Sanford of Cornell University, he has investigated the human immunodeficiency virus, and the two were recently awarded a patent on a way to inhibit a similar viral infection in cats.

He believes that ethics and value are central, money is not, and his concept of "profession" has religious origins from monasteries where one "professed" his faith. In biomedical engineering, he insisted that Engineers receive top billing in their professional journeys, doctors in medical. Professionalism is the theme of Greatbatch's favorite speech to students. He urges them , "Don't fear failure. Don't crave success," and "that the reward is not in the results, but rather in the doing."