Pat Horner’s Remarks Third Annual AEMB Luncheon September 30, 2005 My Personal BME Journey I began work in 1965 at the American Institute of Biological Sciences with the BioInstrumentation Advisory Council (BIAC) which was funded jointly by NASA and the Office of Naval Research to bring Technology utilization to the space program. The BioInstrumentation Advisory Council had some of our early pioneers as members; in fact Otto Schmitt, the first BMES president, was a member and a world renowned physicist. He built one of the first digital computers using scraps that the University of Minnesota discarded. He also placed transmitters on several different animals and tracked their every move at a preserve at the University of Minnesota and I had the pleasure of seeing rooms full of tracking data. Bill Cochran was also a member of the BIAC Council and I spent several nights tracking thrushes over hundreds of miles on their southern migration with the truck built by the Illinois Natural History survey. The thrushes would land at daybreak and they were caught and transmitters attached to a collar and when they took off at dusk, we tracked their movements through the night and in some instances across two states. I visited with other members of the BIAC Council as well: Ken Norris in California was working with porpoises and killer whales; Stu Mackay wrote the first book on biotelemetry and we held several workshops with him across the country; and Howard Baldwin at his lab in Tucson tracking coyotes. I was able to see one of the early space shots at Cape Kennedy and have breakfast with the astronauts and Verner von Braun. One of our technology utilization projects was to create a machine that would feed the monkey strapped in the space capsule; the biologists told engineers what they wanted and six months later the engineers built the better mousetrap, the only problem was that the food went over the monkey’s head instead of in his mouth. For the Office of Naval Research, we helped to develop the first co-axial cable from the island of Bimini to show the ocean floor at the National Aquarium in Washington, DC. And then we founded the Alliance for Engi- neering in Medicine and Biology (AEMB). There existed a Joint Committee on Engineering in Medicine and Biology with representatives from several societies—the IEEE, ASME, AICHE, and the ISA that pooled their resources and each year conducted the Joint Conference on Engineering in Medicine and Biology (JCEMB). This group decided to create a new federation of organizations. It began with 20 societies, ten engineering and 10 medical, and we took over the JCEMB and it became the Annual Confer- ence on Engineering in Medicine and Biology (ACEMB). Lester Goodman, then at the BioEngineering Instrumentation Branch (BEIB) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was the Founding President of this new organization. At his laboratory I was able to observe a calf with the first blood pump. They were having difficulty in these early days with the body rejecting materials for anything implantable and one evening as Lester was sitting at his kitchen table watching his wife wash her lingerie it occurred to him that spandex Lycra was pure and maybe he should try using it for the blood pump. It turned out that it only came by the train carload in liquid form, but he arranged with the company to send him a small supply and was able to patent the first blood pump. I also saw one of the first medical lasers used at NIH and a mouse milking machine. Lester was my mentor in AEMB and then he moved to Medtronic where they were working on neuromuscular pulse stimulators. Alan Kahn was also at Medtronic and later became president of AEMB and he and Lester provided me with the prototype NeuroMod for my muscle spasms. I also visited Case Western Reserve University where Wen Ko was implanting pacemakers. The AEMB Council enabled me to meet many of the future leaders of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES): Art Johnson, currently Secretary of BMES, was also Treasurer & President of AEMB; Eric Guilbeau, Herb Lipowsky, Bob Plonsey, Morton Friedman, Larry Katz, Jack Linehan, John Lyman, and Peter Katona were all presidents of BMES; and Paul Hale with whom I also worked with in RESNA and now BMES. I was also present when BMES was founded in Atlantic City in 1968. It was during this time that Dan Reneau, then Chair of the BME Department at Louisiana Tech (now President of Louisiana Tech) and Treasurer of AEMB, founded Alpha Eta Mu Beta, the National Biomedical Engineering Honor Society, and we provided the secretariat for the organization. Stan Napper was then the student representative to the AEMB Council and later the National Executive Director along with Paul as National President of AEMB. You will notice that is how we came up with Alpha Eta Mu Beta (AEMB) because the acronym matched the Alliance for Engineering in Medicine and Biology. When I joined BMES, Herb Voigt suggested that we bring AEMB to BMES and there I was looking at the files from Stan Napper with certificates that still had my signature on from the late sixties. BMES began with AEMB in 1999 at the Atlanta meeting with ten chapters and we meet here today with twenty chapters. Thanks to the Alliance for Engineering in Medicine and Biology, I was able to attend several International Conferences in Dresden, East Germany; in London; and two in Canada. National Science Foundation (NSF) funding also took me to Egypt for a 5-year program where we set-up an Ultrasound Center at Cairo University with two workshops each year in Cairo and post-workshop critiques in Luxor, Abu Simble, and Aswan; a 2-year program in Yugoslavia in Dubrovik where the meetings were held in a palace overlooking the island of Locrum where Richard the Lion Hearted was washed ashore during the Crusades. The NSF funding was made possible with the assistance of Gil Devey and Lester Goodman, both of whom I consider among my mentors in Biomedical Engineering. I also provided management, along with AAPM, for the World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering in 1988 in San Antonio with Bob Nerem as Chair. I was able to meet Alan Carmack, Nobel Laureate for the CAT scan; Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock; Michael DeBakey, the famous cardiac surgeon; the first bioengineer astronaut; Jarvik with Barney Clark’s heart, and Les Geddes. During my tenure with the Alliance I produced the first newsletter for EMBS and managed their first six meetings with the ACEMB before they decided to hold separate meetings. I also provided secretariat services for several Alliance member societies including the Society for Advanced Medical Systems, the Rehabilitation Engineering Society of North America, and the IEEE-EMBS. And finally, NSF also funded the founding of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Several workshops brought together the leaders working in biomedical engineering to decide the future of our field. The main focus was to create more funding for BME and AIMBE achieved that goal at the end of Clinton’s presidency when he signed the legislation creating the newest institute at the National Institutes of Health—the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). The AEMB closed its doors and turned its assets and non-profit status over to AIMBE and I was one of the founders. I served as Executive Director of the Rehabilitation Engineering Society of North America (now RESNA, Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology Society of North America) for 10 years and during that time we worked in areas such as standing wheelchairs, sip and puff systems for quads, parabikes for paraplegics, and talking computers. The Veterans Administration (VA) provided support along with the National Institute on Disability & Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR). We helped to write the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Technical Assistance Act (TAA) and worked on renovating hotels so they were accessible. I was elected an Honorary Fellow of RESNA At the same time as Senator Tom Harkin who introduced the ADA & TAA legislation. I also served as Executive Director of the Society for Advanced Medical Systems (SAMS) which later merged with the Society for Computer Medicine and subsequently became the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). SAMS had contracts with the Department of Labor to produce training materials for healthcare assistants for nursing homes. They were also involved with the problem-oriented medical record, artificial intelligence, and telemedicine. I am an Honorary Member of AMIA. My last position was with the Society of Vascular Technology (SVT), now the Society of Vascular Ultrasound (SVU). They measure blood flow in veins and arteries and are involved with certification of vascular technologists and accreditation of vascular laboratories. It was at an SVT Board meeting that I discovered I had a tumor in my right kidney and subsequently lost it to cancer. SVT elected me an Honorary Member. And now to the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES): I knew Rita Schaffer, the BMES Executive Director, and we corresponded while I was Executive Director of the Alliance for Engineering in Medicine & Biology and I also worked with Kay Lyou, BMES’s first director, as well as John Lyman and Fred Weibel, on one of our ACEMB conferences. Eric Guilbeau called me as I was retiring from SVT and said that RITA had died and they wanted to move the BMES office to Washington. The hitaker Foundation awarded a 5-year grant to expand and grow BMES. In fact, Herb Voigt, our AEMB National President, wrote the Whitaker proposal when he was BMES president-elect, and he has been one of my mentors in BMES, along with Herb Lipowsky and Eric Guilbeau. Paul Hale enabled us to achieve membership in ABET, the American Board for Engineering & Technology, to become the lead society for accreditation of U.S. Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering programs. It has been an enlightening journey, a challenge at times, a privilege to have worked with some amazing and talented people, and to have made a small contribution to the success of our biomedical engineering community. I’ve loved every minute of it. As I said in 1999 at my first BMES meeting, This is my home.

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