Medtronic co-founder who created wearable pacemaker dies

MINNEAPOLIS >> Earl Bakken, an electronics repairman who created the first wearable external pacemaker and co-founded one of the world’s largest medical device companies, Medtronic, has died. He was 94.

Bakken, who also commercialized the first implantable pacemaker in 1960, died Sunday at his home in Hawaii, Medtronic said in a statement. It didn’t give a cause of death.

Bakken and his brother-inlaw, Palmer Hermundslie, formed Medtronic in 1949 and turned it from a struggling company they ran out of the Hermundlie family’s Minneapolis garage into a multinational medical technology powerhouse.

“The contributions Earl made to the field of medical technology simply cannot be overstated,” said Medtronic’s chairman and CEO, Omar Ishrak. “His spirit will live on with us as we work to fulfill the mission he wrote nearly 60 years ago — to alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life.”

Bakken, who led the company for

40 years, was fitted for his own pacemaker in 2001 and a replacement in

2009.

One of the men who followed Bakken as chief executive, Harvard management professor Bill George, said Bakken made sure that Medtronic’s future leaders followed the company’s original values, which are laid out in its mission statement.

“He was a remarkable human being, a visionary 25 years ahead of his time,” George told the Star Tribune.