Medicine by Design: The Practice and Promise of Biomedical Engineering

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Iam deeply indebted to the many biomedical engineers, physicians , scientists, and students who met with me as I traveled around the country researching this book. Biomedical engineering is a new, sprawling, and complex field, and were it not for the hospitality and patience of the more than 200 people I interviewed, I would never have been able to pull off this project. I am especially indebted to the following people: Shu Chien, chairman of the Bioengineering Department at the University of California, San Diego; Katherine W. Ferrara, founding chairwoman of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Davis; Kenneth R. Lutchen, chairman of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University; Robert M. Nerem, director of the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues; P. Hunter Peckham, executive director of the Cleveland FES Center and professor of biomedical engineering at Case University; Clinton R. Rubin, chairman of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the State University of New York, Stony Brook; Thomas C. Skalak, chairman of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia; and Savior L.-Y. Woo, director of the Musculoskeletal Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh. And for all their help I also would like to thank Michael Lysaght, director of Brown University’s Center for Biomedical Engineering, and Martin L. Yarmush, chairman of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University. I want to thank Mary Buckett of the Cleveland FES Center for her kind assistance. Thanks, as well, to Claudia Morain of the UC Davis Cancer Center. I am also indebted to Earl Bakken and all the people at Medtronic who met with me, and thanks to Medtronic’s Christine
Campbell-Loth and Richard Fischer for helping arrange my visits to the company’s headquarters. I also want to thank Weng Tao and her colleagues at Neurotech for speaking with me about their company. I am also grateful to the dozens of patients who took the time to speak with me about their lives and how biomedical engineering had changed them. Thanks to you all. This book would not have come into being without the support and financial underwriting of the Whitaker Foundation, which is fitting , since the field of biomedical engineering would not be where it is today without the foundation’s generosity and unstinting efforts. The foundation has done more than any single private organization to foster the growth of biomedical engineering as an academic discipline . In the course of three decades, the foundation spent more than $900 million, most of it to help create and build new departments of biomedical engineering or expand existing ones. It also supported the research of more than 1,000 engineers and scientists. In its relatively brief life, the foundation had a unique impact on biomedical engineering, a discipline that has made great contributions to improving human health. This impact was possible because of the foundation’s decision to close its doors, in line with the wishes of U. A. Whitaker, whose fortune was used to establish the foundation in the early 1970s. Because of its decision to spend all of its funds, the foundation was able to shape a field in a way that few other nonprofit groups have ever done. The departments of biomedical engineering I visited for this book all benefited from the foundation’s generosity . The foundation will cease to exist in the summer of 2006, but its legacy will live on for decades. I am indebted to the foundation’s governing committee and would particularly like to thank chairman G. Burtt Holmes and U. A. Whitaker’s daughters, Ruth Whitaker Holmes and Portia Whitaker Shumaker. The committee’s staff also was extremely helpful throughout , and I would particularly like to thank Frank N. Blanchard, Mark A. Bowman, James A. Frost, Peter G. Katona, and John H. Linehan. Many thanks to my literary agent, Michael Carlisle, for his continued support and his important role in this project. Thanks to Vincent J. Burke, my editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, for x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS his many valuable ideas and his thoughtful work on the manuscript. Thanks also to Grace Carino for her fine job copyediting this work. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Laurie Hays, and my daughters , Claire and Nuni, for their understanding, patience, and love as yet another assignment took me away from home. And many thanks to...