He was a farm boy, born in Kansas, reared in Missouri. He came of age at the dawn of the twentieth century. When he was 41, he founded a company that 24 years later entered the Fortune 500. Pry open almost anything electronic and see the stamp of his company, AMP Inc. Now, 30 years after his death, Uncas A. Whitaker’s influence has touched almost every major academic institution in the United States through the foundation that bears his name.

The Whitaker Foundation will close in a few weeks, having accomplished its mission in the spirit of its founder. In both business and philanthropy, Whitaker kept his sights on the goal of improving the quality of life for the greatest number of people. The foundation was similarly single-minded in pursuit of its mission. By keeping its grant-making tightly focused, it has given strength and permanence to a new academic field: biomedical engineering. From this field have come new treatments for the sick, cures for the injured, and the promise of a brighter future for human health.

Like the successful businessmen of his day, Whitaker flew planes and sailed boats. But he was no jet-setter. He was a private, practical man who wore plain suits and directed subordinates by asking questions rather than by giving orders. He went hunting and fishing with a close circle of friends. Before his daughter, Ruth, got her driver’s license, he gave her a set of tools and taught her how to change a tire.

In 1941, Whitaker took over a small New Jersey company that had a faster, less expensive, and more reliable way to attach wires to terminals for the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. Before World War II, wires were connected by twisting their ends together or wrapping them around screws or soldering them to small metal posts that served as terminals. Whitaker’s company, renamed Aircraft-Marine Products Inc., abolished the tedious handwork of soldering. His precision product, a crimping tool that looked like a pair of pliers, squeezed the terminal onto the wire, binding the two in a snap that set off a manufacturing revolution in the electronics industry.

AMP was grounded in a simple principle: Discover what the customer needs and supply it. What America needed in the 1940s was warplanes. Franklin D. Roosevelt had called for the aircraft industry to increase production from 5,856 to 50,000 airplanes per year. What industry needed were simple, light electrical connectors that met military specifications. Whitaker filled both of these needs with his revolutionary new tools.

The war economy gave the young company a boost, but it was not enough to sustain a one-product enterprise indefinitely, and Whitaker knew that. Armed with engineering and law degrees, he was well prepared to take his young company to the next level, improving its crimping tools and inventing related technologies through quality engineering. Within 10 years, AMP offered thousands of custom connection devices.

The post-war boom in household appliances, television sets, and more complex automobiles, along with the emergence of computers in industry, all raised the demand for AMP’s products. The company rode the leading edge of this electronics boom to become the world’s largest firm of its kind. By 1997, it had a workforce of 45,000 at 244 facilities in 50 countries, with sales approaching $6 billion. Two years later, the company sold to Tyco.

Whitaker died in 1975. His will set aside part of his personal fortune for a foundation to improve people’s lives. In a series of transactions from his estate, and later from that of his wife, Helen, The Whitaker Foundation took in $130.7 million between 1975 and 1990, creating one of the nation’s preeminent philanthropies. By 1994, the foundation ranked as the sixty-first largest foundation in the United States, with assets valued at $340 million and annual grant expenditures of $26 million.

The foundation’s board of directors—The Whitaker Foundation Governing Committee—followed the example set by Whitaker in his own giving. During his lifetime, he was convinced that engineers could help solve some of the most pressing medical problems of the day. He speculated in 1968 that “over the next generation or two, most of the ills that people have now will be solved.” He signed checks to support academic programs that brought together engineers, physicians, and biologists to solve medical problems. He gave to the Health Sciences and Technology program at Harvard University and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he endowed a chair in 1967. The program enabled Harvard medical students to earn a medical engineering degree at MIT.

The Whitaker Foundation followed this example in creating its first major initiative, the Biomedical Engineering Research Grants Program, which supported engineering research in medicine and biology. In doing so, the foundation took aim at a niche that had been largely overlooked by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the two major public sponsors of research in engineering and medicine. NIH often rejected biomedical engineering proposals as having too much engineering and not enough medicine, while NSF turned them down for the opposite reasons.

The Whitaker Foundation made its first research grant in 1976. The $60,000 award went to William Pierce, M.D., of Penn State University, who was using a ventricular assist device to wean postoperative patients off the heart-lung machine. Over the years, the foundation continued to support this area of research. Recently the ventricular assist device won approval of the Food and Drug Administration as a permanent treatment for heart failure. The foundation has supported a wide range of research at the crossroads of engineering and medicine, including studies in imaging, cellular mechanics, molecular transport, signaling, neuroengineering, and the medical applications of nanotechnology.

The Biomedical Engineering Research Grants Program was the first of nine major grant programs. The three-year grants gave young investigators a chance to generate a first-round of research results. Having these results in hand made it easier to obtain continued funding from NIH, NSF, and other sources because the work had become less speculative. The goal of the Whitaker program was to get young investigators started in biomedical engineering, with the idea that other funding agencies would provide continued support. One measure of the program’s overall success is how many investigators obtained this continued funding. Respondents to a foundation survey in 2002 reported receiving subsequent funding from NIH, NSF, the Department of Defense, other government sources, various private foundations, and industry. Sixty-one percent had received support from NIH and 35 percent from NSF.

To assess the quality of funding proposals, the foundation established the Scientific Review Committee, a standing panel with expertise in a wide range of relevant areas. Their expertise was periodically supplemented by that of guest reviewers brought in as needed. The permanent panel members noted in reviewing applications that there were wide discrepancies between the strongest and weakest proposals. They blamed this gap on the educational system. Most engineers working in medicine and biology at that time had been educated through conventional programs of the day, taking engineering courses from engineering schools, medical courses from medical schools, and biology courses from colleges of arts and sciences. There was little or no discrete curriculum in biomedical engineering and what little there was varied widely from university to university. A few institutions had established formal graduate programs. There were even a few undergraduate programs. But the overall educational infrastructure for this relatively new field was weak.

To meet the need for better, more focused education at the interface of engineering and the life sciences, the foundation established a new program, Development Awards in Biomedical Engineering. These awards of up to $5 million originally supported graduate and postgraduate biomedical engineering at universities and medical schools. The first awards were made in 1988 to The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Washington.

The Development Awards program began when the foundation was reaching its peak endowment from the Whitaker estates. With these additional resources came new opportunities for funding. But there were limits. If the foundation was to remain financially strong from year to year, it could only spend so much while reinvesting the balance. Discussions began about the future.

In 1991 the Governing Committee decided that to have the greatest impact on this nascent field, and ultimately on people’s health, the foundation should make a much more substantial and urgent investment. Biomedical engineering was at a turning point. It was becoming a well-organized field, and the converging revolutions in microelectronics and molecular biology were opening up vast new opportunities for engineers to contribute. The potential was great, but it was going to take time for this new field to get rolling. The governing committee envisioned a time when biomedical engineering would make a significant difference in human health. A sense of urgency arose. Why wait?

In creating the foundation, Whitaker suggested, but did not require, that it dedicate itself to a goal, accomplish that goal, and then terminate. The Governing Committee seized on this and the opportunity it saw for making a substantial difference in society. The foundation would sacrifice itself to its mission. It would spend out, contributing all of its investment income and assets in support of biomedical engineering. When the decision was made, financial projections estimated that the foundation would be able to put a total of about $600 million into the field by the time it closed. Thanks to the stock market boom of the 1990s, this figure grew significantly.

The foundation took advantage of this growth and the potential it offered for improving biomedical engineering education. It offered graduate fellowships beginning with the 1992-93 academic year. It moved its headquarters from just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to a suburb of Washington, D.C., close to NIH, NSF, and the makers of public policy on biomedical research and education. It expanded its professional staff and began to establish ties with the government, educational organizations, professional societies, and other private foundations, with the aim of generating more support for biomedical engineering. The Whitaker leadership wanted to convince others of the importance of biomedical engineering and its need for financial support, both now and in the future, especially beyond 2006 when the foundation would no longer exist.

The spend-out plan permitted the establishment of awards that supported biomedical engineering in almost every way possible. The foundation funded research, education programs, curriculum development, fellowships, internships, textbooks, conferences, meetings, leadership development, faculty hiring, classroom and laboratory construction and renovation, building construction, industrial collaborations, government collaborations, professional societies, and in its final and largest grant, international fellowships and scholarships.

Together these programs have succeeded in institutionalizing the field of biomedical engineering, providing a permanent infrastructure for education and research that will last well into the future. Specifically, Whitaker funding has launched the careers of nearly 1,500 biomedical engineers who have invented more than 200 products and devices for medical science and clinical care. Whitaker investigators have started more than 100 health technology companies over the past 30 years, according to a foundation survey. Whitaker investigators own 278 patents and 125 intellectual property licenses.

The foundation supported the creation of at least 30 academic departments and funded enhancements at dozens of others. Nationwide, the number of departments has risen from 22 in the early 1990s to almost 80. The foundation helped build 13 buildings for biomedical engineering and funded renovations and other physical improvements at dozens of other universities.

With foundation support, scores of new faculty members have been hired, students enrolled, doctoral degrees awarded, and undergraduate programs created. More than 10,000 students have been mentored. A total of 414 graduates benefited from fellowships that gave them the flexibility to choose their own career paths rather than gravitate to an area because other funding was already present. Thirty-three universities established internship programs that placed students in real-world situations, many of which led directly to jobs. Eleven awards were made for textbooks specially written for biomedical engineering students. The first tissue engineering textbook was published under this program. More than 100 biomedical engineers from 52 institutions received top-quality leadership training with foundation support. Whitaker joined with both NIH and NSF in programs to make biomedical engineers think about the consumer cost of the health care technologies they develop.

Other institutions have begun to recognize the potential of biomedical engineering collaborations, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation, and the Keck Foundation. The idea of bringing engineers into medical research has spread beyond departments to free-standing research institutes and other formal centers of collaborative research and education. Stanford University has Bio-X, which brings together investigators in biology, chemistry, medicine, surgery, engineering, physics, and computer science. Three other California universities—the University of California at San Francisco, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz—have joined to create the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research, otherwise known as QB3. The University of Michigan’s Life Sciences Institute is designed to foster interaction between life scientists and physical scientists, and there are many others. One benefit of biomedical engineering training is that it equips graduates with a language that bridges specializations of medicine, biology, and engineering. As they enter into these collaborative networks, they already know the language of their collaborators. They are a step ahead in becoming productive team members. The Whitaker Foundation supported both the the Biomedical Engineering Society, which has become the lead professional society for accrediting university programs in biomedical engineering, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, an umbrella organization that helped the establishment of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at NIH.

All told, The Whitaker Foundation has had a profound impact on the academic landscape as a major force behind the institutionalization of a new multidisciplinary field. More importantly, a stream of new technologies and approaches for patient care, disease prevention, injury repair, and health promotion has already begun to flow from the laboratories and classrooms that have benefited from the foundation’s spend-out strategy.

Shu Chien, M.D., Ph.D., University Professor of Bioengineering and Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, commented at a recent meeting that the foundation has been instrumental in transforming biomedical engineering “from a fledgling field to a mature discipline that has gained the recognition and respect of all fields in medicine, the sciences, and engineering… The extent and rapidity of the development of a field by the effort of a single foundation is unprecedented.”

In addition to its national biomedical engineering programs, the foundation operated two initiatives to benefit the communities where Uncas Whitaker and his wife Helen resided, Harrisburg, Penn., and Naples, Fla.. The two regional programs focused on supporting elementary science education and on helping economically disadvantaged individuals gain self-sufficiency. These themes reflected Uncas Whitaker’s own personal philanthropic activities.

In Fen Montaigne’s “Medicine by Design,” published by Johns Hopkins Press, retired physician and teacher Theodore Hersh of Atlanta tells how an experimental cellular implant restored some of the vision he had lost to retinitis pigmentosa. “I can see what’s on the cover of Time magazine from five feet away and couldn’t before,” said Hersh, who is in his 70s. “And I can get around a little better by myself.”

Four months after the device was removed, Hersh still retained his improved vision. “I think they have a real contraption there,” he said. “If it’s helping me, imagine what it could do for a younger person, where the disease hasn’t progressed as much. If I’d had this earlier, I’d still be teaching.”

Hersh is one of thousands of patients who are reaping the health benefits of biomedical engineering. Uncas Whitaker may have been too optimistic in predicting an end to the major illnesses of the twentieth century. But his legacy is sure to improve many lives.