I spent the year-end holidays in Israel and had the pleasure of speaking with some of Mennen Medical’s and Omikron Scientific’s first employees regarding the efforts that these companies made in the late 1970s and early 1980s towards the development and manufacture of pacemakers in Israel.
Benny Kiron, who joined Mennen Medical in 1976 as a product designer, referred me to Dr. Shmuel Yerushalmi’s memoir at www.makash.org.il/sy/jerusa_book.pdf, from which I was finally able to understand the origin of Mennen Medical’s pacemaker project, as well as its relationship with Omikron Scientific.
Dr. Shmuel Yerushalmi was born in Brasil and emigrated to Israel in 1956. In 1976, while still pursuing his doctorate at the prestigious Weizmann Institute, he started working at the Israeli subsidiary of Mennen-Greatbatch of Clarence, NY.
The Mennen-Greatbatch partnership was dissolved when Wilson Greatbatch decided to concentrate on lithium battery development, and the Israeli company became a subsidiary of Mennen Medical, where an implantable pacemaker project was started.
Shmuel Yerushalmi had worked on the development of an RF-powered pacemaker while still a technician at the Weizmann institute, so his experience was tapped at Mennen Medical to lead the development of a VVI pacemaker powered by a Greatbatch lithium battery. The project was supported by Israel’s Chief Scientist Office and the BIRD (Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development) Foundation .