A grocer’s son from Portland
Alfred Eugene Mann was born on November 6, 1925, in Portland, Oregon, into a Jewish immigrant family. His father, Charles Emanual Mann, was a grocer who had come from England; his mother, Anna Schnitzer, a pianist and singer, had emigrated from Poland. A family story often told about him says that he set up a lemonade stand at the age of five and never stopped looking for the next venture.
He served in the Army Air Corps during the Second World War and then studied physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and a master’s in 1951. In the early 1950s he began working in electro-optical engineering and semiconductors, fields that would carry him first into space and then into the human body.
Powering spacecraft
In 1956, with military backing, Mann founded Spectrolab, an electro-optical systems company that supplied the U.S. Army with guidance equipment for anti-tank missiles. He also founded Heliotek, a semiconductor company, and the two became major suppliers of solar cells for spacecraft. His companies provided the electric power for more than 100 spacecraft and built one of the experiments left on the Moon.
It was the dawn of the space age, and solar cells offered a way to keep satellites powered for long periods in orbit, turning sunlight into electricity with no fuel to run out. He sold the companies to Textron in 1960 but continued to run them until 1972. Spectrolab survives today as part of Boeing. The experience taught him how to build tiny, reliable, long-lasting electronics and power sources, exactly the skills that implanted medical devices would need.
A pacemaker that could be recharged
In 1969 researchers at Johns Hopkins asked Mann to help with a pressing problem. Cardiac pacemakers, which keep a slow or irregular heart beating with small electrical pulses, ran on batteries that wore out, so patients needed repeated operations to replace them. Mann founded Pacesetter Systems to develop a longer-lived device using technology from his aerospace work, and the company introduced the first commercial rechargeable implantable pacemaker.
Pacesetter became a major pacemaker maker. Mann sold it to Siemens in 1985 for 150 million dollars and stayed on to manage it until 1992; it later became part of St. Jude Medical. For many patients with heart rhythm disorders, longer-lasting pacemakers meant fewer operations and safer lives.
Insulin pumps and the fight against diabetes
In 1979 a doctor challenged Mann to apply his skills to diabetes. People with type 1 diabetes must replace the insulin their bodies cannot make, and at the time that meant several daily injections that only roughly matched the body’s needs. Mann founded MiniMed, which became the leading maker of insulin pumps, small wearable devices that deliver insulin continuously through the day and night, and later developed continuous glucose monitors that track blood sugar around the clock.
He ran MiniMed for many years and sold it to Medtronic in 2001 for more than 3 billion dollars. Insulin pumps and glucose sensors descended from that work are used today by very large numbers of people with diabetes around the world, giving them tighter control of blood sugar and more freedom in daily life. A pump supplies a steady background dose and lets the wearer add extra insulin at mealtimes, more like the way a healthy pancreas works, and when linked to a glucose sensor it can warn of dangerous highs and lows before they cause harm. Tighter control of blood sugar lowers the risk of the long-term damage diabetes does to eyes, kidneys and nerves. In his later years he poured his energy and fortune into MannKind Corporation, which developed Afrezza, an inhaled insulin approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June 2014. MannKind licensed it to the French drug company Sanofi in a deal valued at up to 925 million dollars, but Sanofi withdrew from the partnership in early 2016, and the product never became the commercial success Mann had hoped for.
Hearing, sight and movement
Mann’s company Advanced Bionics developed and manufactured cochlear implants, electronic devices that bypass damaged parts of the inner ear and stimulate the hearing nerve directly, allowing many deaf children and adults to hear speech. Unlike a hearing aid, which only makes sound louder, a cochlear implant turns sound into electrical signals delivered by a thin array of electrodes inside the cochlea, so it can help people whose hair cells are too damaged for amplification to work. For children born deaf, an early implant can make spoken language and ordinary schooling possible. Its cochlear implant business is now owned by Sonova, and its pain management and nerve stimulation products became part of Boston Scientific.
He also founded and chaired Second Sight Medical Products, whose Argus II retinal prosthesis received FDA approval in 2013; according to USC it was the first artificial retina approved in the United States and the European Economic Area. It restores some rudimentary vision to people blinded by the inherited disease retinitis pigmentosa. Another of his companies, Bioness, applied electrical stimulation to help people with paralysis and nerve damage move weakened limbs, and Quallion produced high-reliability batteries for medical implants and aerospace.
Turning research into treatments
Mann believed that many promising inventions died in university laboratories because no one carried them through to products that patients could use. In 1985 he created the Alfred Mann Foundation to work with scientists and research organizations on bionic solutions for people with debilitating medical impairments, and the foundation was later charged with selecting, establishing and overseeing institutes at universities. Each institute was designed as an incubator: rather than simply funding research, it would take promising inventions from university laboratories and prepare them for the regulatory approval and manufacturing needed to reach patients. In 1998 he made a first gift of 100 million dollars to the University of Southern California to found the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering, which funds and guides medical inventions toward commercial use; his giving to USC eventually exceeded 170 million dollars. The institute helped develop several medical products, including the Argus II retina.
He founded a similar institute at the Technion, Israel’s institute of technology in Haifa. Not every gift went smoothly. An earlier attempt to fund an institute at UCLA, his alma mater, failed because he wanted to keep control of the patents and revenues the institute would produce. A 100 million dollar endowment to Purdue University in 2007 created an institute there, but it was closed and the unspent portion of the gift was withdrawn in 2012.
Jewish roots and Israel
Mann grew up in Portland, the son of parents who had come from England and Poland, and his Jewish Journal obituary describes him simply as born to a Jewish immigrant family. His strongest public link to Israel was the biomedical engineering institute he established at the Technion, endowed with more than 100 million dollars, which aimed to bring Israeli medical inventions to patients in the same way as his institute in Los Angeles.
When he died, the American Friends of Rabin Medical Center, which supports one of Israel’s largest hospitals, remembered him and his wife, Claude, as kind-hearted friends of the organization. His philanthropy, like his business, centred on one idea: getting new medical technology out of the laboratory and into people’s lives.
The man
Mann was famously tireless and worked seven days a week well into his eighties. He founded 17 companies over seven decades, by USC’s count, and became a billionaire, though he also risked much of his fortune on ventures that struggled; he put about a billion dollars of his own money into MannKind, whose inhaled insulin struggled commercially after its launch. He was married four times and had seven children. He lived for many years in Beverly Hills.
He chaired the Southern California Biomedical Council, which promoted the biotech and medical device industries of the Los Angeles region, was a life trustee of USC, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He received honorary doctorates from USC, Johns Hopkins University, Western University of Health Sciences and the Technion, the American Academy of Achievement’s Golden Plate Award in 2000, and a lifetime achievement award from the medical device industry in 2011. Outside medicine he was also the largest investor in Eclipse Aviation, a maker of small jets. When asked why he kept going, he said it was for the satisfaction of making a difference in people’s lives.
Death and legacy
Alfred Mann died of natural causes in Las Vegas on February 25, 2016, at the age of 90, survived by his wife, Claude, his seven children and ten grandchildren. He had stepped down as chairman of MannKind only days earlier, on February 17, after leading the company since 2001.
He was not primarily a laboratory inventor but a builder who took ideas from engineers and physicians and turned them into products that reached patients. The rechargeable pacemaker, the insulin pump, the cochlear implant and the artificial retina all passed through companies he founded and financed. People around the world who hear with implants, manage diabetes with pumps and sensors, or live with pacemakers have benefited from technologies that his companies helped create and bring to market.
Sources & further reading
Alfred E. Mann, Wikipedia · Alfred Mann obituary, Jewish Journal · In memoriam: USC trustee, entrepreneur Alfred E. Mann, 90, USC News · Alfred E. Mann, 90, pioneer in medical devices, Boston Globe · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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