Earl bakken autobiography for kids

Home / Scientists & Inventors / Earl bakken autobiography for kids

I used to pick her up after work, and they would say, “Earl, could you fix this device for us?”. He wanted the pressure gage he was using for monitoring patients’ blood flow, or blood pressure, to be accurately calibrated. In 1954 he came up with the idea of doing open-heart surgery on blue babies, babies who have an interventricular septal defect, some of them at birth.

He could always buffalo them into being embarrassed by the fact that they didn’t look at history.

Bakken:

Well, we have an astronomy center on the Big Island. Then you ask, well is it good enough to keep the child alive, is it reliable? And this of course didn’t work too well with kids because the kids would start playing with the knobs or they’d turn it off.

A simple little thing, but it makes a big difference in people’s lives that someone cares enough to bring a hot towel.

Even the cooks. I don’t even know if you want to call it a hospital. He started a company called Medtronic. There are so many companies that have a mission statement and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s interesting that the pacing market has been there fifty years and it’s still growing.

And then we heard from Greatbatch in Buffalo.

Early Interest in Medical Equipment

Bakken:

I’m very interested in the organization of medical engineering, medical electronics, because that’s what I got into. So this was a programmer, not a very complex programmer, but you could shut it off by shorting the wires together if it was running away.

He said he never would have gone through college if it hadn’t been for our pump.

It’s a good name in the field so we have to protect it in every way we can. I brought it over to the hospital one day, and the next day they were using this pacemaker attached to a child. It was just after World War II and electronics had started to move into hospital equipment. He was also a kind person who gave a lot to charity. When they get the blood flowing between the ventricles the blood that gets pumped around the baby is bluish, it has a bluish tinge to it, and so they were called “blue babies”.