DAD A FRIEND AND A MENTOR TO MANY
‘A life of dedication, purpose and service ... a life of love and family’
Leon Katz Born: Dec. 20, 1924 in Montreal Died: Jan. 9, 2015 in Ottawa of mesothelioma and lung cancer
The Ten Commandments appear twice in the Hebrew Bible — in Exodus and Deuteronomy — and the Sixth Commandment is: “Honour Thy Father and Mother.”
Accordingly, I offer this tribute to my beloved father — a friend and mentor to many.
Throughout my parents’ lives, they never sought the limelight, but rather preferred obscurity and utter modesty. But my father received both the Order of Ontario and the Officer level of the Order of Canada, he received the Living Legend Award from the World Society of Cardio-Thoracic Surgeons. He received Member Emeritus status from the Canadian Medical and Biological Engineering Society — which gave him particular pleasure because it represented recognition by a college of his peers. And my Dad — who was one of the founders of the Engineering Institute of Canada — was named a “Fellow” at last year’s awards ceremony.
It was only after these recognitions were bestowed that even our closest family members first learned of his cutting edge pioneering bio-medical engineering work. Some of them actually thought my Dad was a roofer!
Leon Katz’s professional biography (from 1950 onward) parallels in a real sense, the arrival, development, and growth of biomedical technology and engineering in the medical world. A fortuitous historical congruence of circumstances shaped his career. The end of the Second World War released new technologies and scientists for civilian use: everything from transistors and other solid-state devices to radioactive isotopes for medical purposes became available.
Into this confluence of explosive developments stepped Leon Katz, academically trained as an electronics engineer and then as a student of human physiology. It was Katz’s fortuitous pairing of academic subjects that enabled him to marry the new world of technology with the world of medicine. His innovative mind, his willingness to go where no one before had tried, his excellence in both creating original medical devices and using them in clinical practice, his in-depth knowledge of both the industrial and health-care worlds — all led to his important original contributions in an astonishing array of medical specialties.
My Dad conceived, designed, hand-crafted, and trained hundreds of others in the operation of Canada’s first heart-lung pump for open heart surgery, Canada’s first fetal heart monitor, Infant incubators (of which three tiny users, many decades later, were his own grandsons!) and a high-speed contrast injector for angiography.
Dad would frequently operate these new devices during literally hundreds of clinical procedures, in part because he was the only person who knew how to do so. For example, operating his own original heart-lung bypass machine, Katz was the perfusionist for Canada’s first successful open-heart surgery (on a small boy), and for thousands of subsequent surgeries.
My Dad particularly delighted in eager, young minds. Among hundreds of his students were cohorts of nurses — including Les Soeurs Grises, for whom he had inordinate respect. To the end of the 1950s, those remarkable nuns managed the complex administration of — and gowned up for surgeries in — hospitals across the province of Quebec. My Dad trained them all to gauge the sensitivity with their fingers of the most finely calibrated devices. He trained respirologists and worked with many dozens of anesthesiologists.
Even at the beginning of January, my father used some of his last gasps of breath, before the mesothelioma and lung cancer — diagnosed only in mid-December — choked the very life out of him, to describe how remarkable it was that back then, an engineer could actually place his hands on the patient during hundreds of surgical procedures — a phenomenon unheard of today.
In the early ’50s, my Dad was one of two biomedical engineers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, providing the renowned neurosurgeon, Dr. Wilder Penfield, with the instruments, tools, and services he used to treat brain-related diseases and to make his dramatic discoveries of the human brain.
In 1953, two visionary staff members of the Montreal Jewish General Hospital decided to explore the possible use in medical applications of I131, the radioactive isotope of iodine which had recently become available from Atomic Energy of Canada’s Chalk River reactor. They discovered my Dad’s unique talents, and then immediately hired him as a physicist.
Undaunted by the new challenges of radiation physics (a complete departure from his work in electrical engineering and neurophysiology), Katz organized the first clinical radio-isotope laboratory in Quebec (and possibly in Canada) that became the first hospital customer for I131 from Atomic Energy of Canada.
From 1955 to 1960, my Dad served as founder and director, Department of Bio-Medical Engineering, Chef, Service de Biophysique; and First Cardio-Pulmonary Bypass Perfusionist, at the Institut de Cardiologie, Montréal, working with Sen. Dr. Paul David.
At Health and Welfare Canada in the ’70s and ’80s, Dad transitioned from clinical work to legislative. Moving to Ottawa, he became the first chief, Diagnostic Devices Division, and Evaluation and Standards Division, Bureau of Medical Devices, in the Health Protection Branch. Among his many contributions that likely affected millions worldwide, was his team’s discovery and correction of the backflow hazard from contaminated evacuated blood collection tubes used to gather blood samples. His article published in The Lancet garnered international attention, and led to recalls of tainted tubes across Britain and the U.S., before they followed Canada’s lead in amending their own legislation requiring sterilization.
Notwithstanding the grinding poverty of my father’s early years, born and raised in Montreal, through the Depression, his parents taught him and his siblings to cherish the value of education and of music. My Dad’s love of opera and the great symphonic works was inculcated from a poor little radio played continuously by my grandmother as she earned her few weekly pennies on the Singer sewing machine at which she worked day and night. At 17, my Dad volunteered for the Canadian Army, ultimately serving in the latter years of the Second World War, as an officer in the British Army, in the American Zone, in the Rhine with 400 Welsh and Scotsmen under his command, implementing the MilGov (Military Government) Laws.
At a time when anti-Semitic quotas limited the number of Jews allowed into Canadian universities, my father’s brilliant mind served as his “ticket to enter.” His graduation as an electrical engineer, followed by his further pairing of physiology, biology, physics, chemistry courses, charted breakthroughs that garnered Canada international recognition. Dad was too busy conceiving, testing, inventing, hand crafting, training, and rushing from hospital to emergency room setting, from clinic to lab, ever to pause to patent anything. His primary focus was on patient care and delivery of safe and effective devices.
I believe that to a significant extent, Leon Katz’s desperation and need, and that of his impoverished parents, bred his ingenuity, his mental dexterity and nimble mind, his innovation and skills that enabled him to “conceive entire solutions out of bits and pieces of randomly found items.” He taught my brothers and me to salvage and reuse every bit of string, bits of wood, tar, metal — anything that might later be converted into a useful kitchen item, or replacement part.
In many regards, my Dad was an outstanding father. He challenged us in unusual ways and stretched our belief in our own capacities. He fashioned the stuff of dreams out of hard economic reality. He and Mum taught us that nothing comes without hard work and dedication to academia and career application. Of course, this commitment was to extend to our music endeavours, athletic undertakings, to family, to community, to Canada and a safe, secure, mutually supportive international community.
He is survived by his devoted and remarkable wife of 65 years, Ruth Gottlieb Katz, his offspring Michael (Cynthia), Geoffrey, Floralove, Shelley (Diana), and his further “living legacy” — his four outstanding grandsons, David, Nathan, Aidan and Benjamin.
My Dad’s was a life of dedication, purpose and service ... a life of love of family ... of the essential values and ethics of Judaism, like his parents before him ... of guidance to, and assistance for the betterment of the lives of others. My father embodied Tikkun Olam — “healing the world” — and my life will be in permanent deficit by virtue of his absence every day.
Canada is blessed to have had him as our citizen. And I am blessed to have had him as my father.