JULY/AUGUST 2010 ▼ IEEE PULSE 55

Ten years ago, the IEEE published an oral history of Max Valentinuzzi, Ph.D., by Frederik Nebeker. With this year’s IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Conference being held in Valentinuzzi’s homeland of Argentina, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology takes

a fresh look at this pioneer of biomedical engineering to share his views on the future of science.

Born in 1932, Valentinuzzi is the son of one of his country’s leading scientists, also named Max Valentinuzzi, who, enthusiastic about the German language, placed him in a German elementary school in Buenos Aires just as ten-sions leading to World War II began. Despite a harsh early education—Valentinuzzi describes the schools’ discipline as “Nazi” and says his teachers slapped students in the face, spanked them, and hit their fingertips with rulers—Valentinuzzi would excel in school, later passing the tough entrance examinations for the Colegio de Buenos Aires secondary school and attending the University of Buenos Aires, where he studied telecommu-nications engineering. This led to his interests in communica-tion possibilities within biological systems and an opportunity to study at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

From there, Valentinuzzi navigated a course in biomedical engineering that traversed uncharted waters; he almost single-handedly pioneered the field in Argentina. He spent ten produc-tive years at Emory College and Baylor College in the United States, earning his Ph.D. degree from Baylor in 1969, and working with such greats as Leslie Geddes and Roger Guillemin, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977. Guillemin gives Valentinuzzi a great deal of credit for his work, saying he is “an unusual combi-nation of an engineer and a biologist,” and adding that Valentinuzzi was involved in the development of the physiograph, an early machine with elec-tronic sensors that produced a paper record of various physiological parameters, including pulse, blood pressure, and breathing rate by direct intraarterial or indirect cuff sensors. “All of that is now com-mon standard equipment,” Guillemin writes via e-mail, “but Max was to do much more, on two continents.” Indeed, it was what he gave to Argentina that made Valentinuzzi a true leader .

“I thought that I owed something to my country, that I ought to remain here,” says Valentinuzzi, speaking from his home in Tucumán, where he has lived and worked for the past 30+ years. “I don’t like to say ‘patriotism,’ because that is a word that belongs to the military. This is the place where I was born and this is the place where I should die.” However, Argentina’s infamous political unrest did not make this choice

an easy one for Valentinuzzi or his family, and, in fact, he calls the decision to remain there through such difficulties “the greatest chal-lenge of his career.” During the time he was most active as a professional, armed groups regularly kidnapped and murdered dissidents. “The possibilities that I had over there [in the United States] were probably much more than

the possibilities that I had here,” he muses, saying that he felt he owed a great deal to the United States, too, because of how well he was treated and how comfortable he felt there.

The situation in Argentina had a negative impact on sci-ence, as in other fields. “It’s very sad when you are forced not to do this, or to do something that you do not want, or [when] your laboratory, for example, is being watched,” he remarks. “I used to live in the university quarter—the university here

Pioneer and Visionary

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPUL.2010.937258

By Jesse Jayne Rutherford

The History of Max Valentinuzzi

Bright Lights and BME in Argentina

2154-2287/10/$26.00©2010 IEEE

56 IEEE PULSE ▼ JULY/AUGUST 2010

is very big in terms of real estate. The city of Tucumán is by the mountains, so just at the very beginning of the moun-tains there is a quarter that belongs to the university and . . . at one point in the 1950s, they constructed a quarter of about thirty, forty houses in a big building and those houses were given to the university professors,” he recalls, adding that the possibility of being given a house practically for free helped make his move back home possible. “One day came a guy [from one of the armed groups] into my house here. I recall it was a Saturday afternoon. I have many books in Russian, technical books . . . electronics, mathematics, because years ago I studied a little bit of Russian. And I recall that this guy was taking a look at my books. He took a book and said, ‘Is this Russian?’

I said ‘yes’. ‘What is this?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this in particular, it’s mathematics.’ ‘Are you sure?’ And obviously the guy was checking on me! Just trying to

discover how much of a communist I was or something like that.” Since democracy returned in 1983, Valentinuzzi says things have improved dramatically, and the national research council has received a considerable amount of funding—not

as much as he would like, but definitely an improvement. “I [always say] I should’ve been born ten years later to enjoy this time because my time here was very tough,” he adds. During the unrest, he still had his resident visa and a visiting professorship with Baylor College of Medicine, and he expe-rienced conflict within himself, his family, and his marriage about whether to return to the States or not. “I learned that, number one, freedom is the greatest thing you can have,” he states. “And even being poor is much better than being rich and not enjoying freedom.”

When he returned to Argentina, there was hardly any biomedical engineering underway in the country, and so he founded the biomedical engineering department at the Univer-sity of Tucumán, preferring that picturesque, tranquil city over the more urban Buenos Aires. “When I came back to Argen-tina, I had to start practically from zero, because I had nothing here,” he recalls. “The lab that I had here was very modest, very simple and we had to build very simple instruments … ev-erything was uphill, and sometimes the hill was very steep,” he adds, chuckling. His fledgling department awarded Argentina’s first Ph.D. in bioengineering to Julio Spinelli, who later moved to the United States, where he has been a fellow at Guidant and the Boston Scientific Corporation and now serves as chief tech-nical officer for Action Medical. Valentinuzzi also established the Argentine Society of Bioengineering, which now has nine regional Chapters and since 1995 has published a small journal, Revista Argentina de Bioengeniería .

Today, Valentinuzzi is mostly retired, though, like many in his field, he is still quite active in retirement. In fact, he is look-ing forward to this year’s EMBS Conference in Buenos Aires be-cause this is the first time the conference has been held in South America. He is encouraging all his colleagues to take advantage of the proximity and attend, telling them, “Please go, partici-pate in the conference, because even if you have to travel from the provinces to Buenos Aires, it is much cheaper than going abroad.” He says the conferences provide a great opportunity for researchers to first build relationships at an individual level and then formalize them, which he says yields greater results than first building relationships at a national or institutional level then trying to connect the individual researchers (for more on this topic, see his comments in the “Technology Adoption” article in this issue, p. 64).

From his vantage point, with the benefit of history and a broad world view, Valentinuzzi has made many observations regarding the activity and effort of humanity. In particular, he notes how, in such tough economic times, the military appears to have easier access to funding than science does, a source of great frustration for him. It is particularly painful for him to see this happening now, after having experienced political unrest himself. “There is a message that the human being is failing to transmit . . . ” he states, “and it is, if science does not help the civilization, then we are wasting our time. We need to produce things for the betterment of the human being.”

Jesse Jayne Rutherford is an award-winning ghostwriter and a free-lance writer. She lives near San Diego, California. For more information, please visit her Web site at www.JesseRutherford.com.

FIGURE 1 Max Valentinuzzi, Colombia, 2005.

FIGURE 2 Valentinuzzi at the Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental (IBYME) in Buenos Aires during an experimental demonstration for the students, 2007.