First, I need to start with a disclaimer: The following is my personal account and thoughts, and in no way represents the official position of Purdue, the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, the College of Engineering, Marketing & Media, or any other person, entity, or institution. In this life, we are sometimes blessed to know people who are more than simply unique. These are people who challenge the status quo, our assumptions about the world and even about what we can do, and do so in a way that is a joy to watch and be a part of. These are people who literally change the world, and the greatest of them also change those around them in powerful and positive ways as well. For the last five years, I've had the honor to be a colleague of one such person. Made frail by time, effectively blind, he still showed up for work every morning at 0430 for the majority of the time I knew him. A man who did not care what position or title you held, but what ideas you held and how hard you were willing to work. Focused on one thing and one thing only: changing the world for the better by improving the lives and health of people. Doing that one thing, he changed the face of modern medicine and made possible the modern implantable medical device industry. More than that, he shaped the minds of those around him and somehow, someway, taught others to think outside the box. That man, was Leslie Alexander Geddes Purdue has an official release that details a few, and just a few, of his accomplishments. I say a few because they were legion and include more than 30 (closer to 50 I think) patents, numerous books and articles, and a drive that had to be seen to be believed. To give you an idea of the man, his research career came from an incident that was somewhat embarrassed to discuss with me early on, as "It nearly got me court martialed." Born in Scotland, not far from Glasgow, his family had moved to Canada and during WWII a very young Les Geddes was a member of His Majesty's engineering corps. That is, until a commanding officer bet the young engineer that he could not blow up the commander's favorite bunker with X amount of explosives (as the tale was related to me by another). Being Les, he was sure he could and did so, rather spectacularly from the account given to me. It was then that the commander decided that research was a better place for him, putting that ingenuity to work on other issues. That research was in doing nerve damage mapping in the wounded, and finding ways to help them. An electrical engineering degree in 1945 was just the first step of a career dedicated to helping others and finding new and innovative ways to do things. A Doctorate in physiology soon followed, and led to work developing the physiological monitoring systems for the first astronauts. Despite the passage of time and march of technology, some of those systems are still in use today because of how well, and how simply and effectively, they were designed. Part of that was because Les Geddes always found a way to approach things from outside the box. That's not really right, however, because what I always found was that he found a way to move the box and turn it so that the new view was clear and straight. One example I witnessed first hand involved CPR. The fact is, CPR is neither effective nor efficient, and --as Les noted -- if it were a medical procedure instead of an emergency procedure, it would have been shelved long ago. Les decided that this was not acceptable, and set out to change the success rate by changing CPR. The first thing he realized was that in all the years people have done and researched CPR, no one had ever done a study to find out how much force was needed to meet the guidelines. Two undergraduate students, a summer, and the research was done. Fact is, it takes in excess of 100 pounds of force to meet the current guidelines, and it is very difficult for most people to meet the minimum amount of force needed. The undergraduates who did the project under his supervision are a key here, a key to how he operated. In the academic research game, most people are -- in my opinion -- very hung up on titles, positions, degrees, and such. Not Les. If you had a good idea, you had a good idea and it didn't matter if you were the custodian. If you had an energy and talent he needed, you were part of the team and a full member at that. If you look at the grant applications and papers from his team(s), you will find people who are not Ph.D's holding key positions, even lead authors and grant recipients. I can think of a couple of staff members who do not have doctorates, but probably have more NIH and other prestigious grants and significant journal articles than formal faculty at other institutions. He shared the wealth and put credit where it was due. Sharing the wealth was literal too. When Purdue sharked Les and his team from Baylor back in 1974, one of the first things he did was to force Purdue to revamp how they did patents. In short order, Purdue found itself sharing patent royalties with not just the inventor/researcher (a novel idea for the time), but with the departments in which they worked. Les made sure that the researchers had an incentive to not just do research but innovate, and that their departments had good cause to let them do so. He also stood staid academia on its head by actively seeking out corporate and other similar research funds. Doing commercial research was an anathema to many in...
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Posted
Oct 26 2009, 02:25 AM
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BLACKFIVE