The Return of Dr. Kurt Amplatz

The judge told me I’m not a director, I’m not a shareholder, and I’m not an employee of AGA, because I did not accept any royalties or any salary. So I had to leave the premises within 24 hours,” Amplatz complains in an Austrian accent that lingers more than 50 years after he emigrated. “I was not allowed to come back to my own company. I didn’t have any work for a year and a half. Where is the justice in this country?”

(That Amplatz took no salary or royalties from his company is a fact. The part about finding no work to occupy him during his forced vacation—not quite so accurate.)

Characteristically, Amplatz doesn’t particularly care that his new job title is research consultant rather than president. “I wasn’t a good president,” he says, in the unconcerned tone of a man remarking that he isn’t adept at bowling. Nor does he mind greatly that, though he’s still a director on AGA’s board, he has little say in the company’s operations: “[The board] meets, I think, four times a year or whatever. I don’t get involved with management of the company. I was never that involved in the business aspects.”

One cringes to say of the founder of a $100 million company that he never cared about the money. But conversations with Amplatz and with people who know him, not to mention his own actions, force one to conclude that money is far down on his list of concerns.

At the risk of engaging in amateur psychology, let’s put it this way: Amplatz is proud that AGA provides a living for its 175 employees, but he sees the company mostly as a necessary delivery system for his occlusion devices—i.e., AGA is similar to the catheters that carry his occluders to defective hearts. The thing he hates most about lawyers and court proceedings is not that they cost the company a fortune but that they gum up the pipeline that leads from his workshop to patients’ chests.

To the degree that this is true, it is complicated by the fact that Amplatz, instantly likable himself, isn’t all that fond of most patients.

An Inventor’s Disposition

It’s not an exaggeration to call Amplatz a living legend among cardiologists worldwide. For four decades, he was a professor of radiology at the University of Minnesota. His 83-page résumé documents hundreds of papers published, honors received from medical associations, and inventions.

His occluder devices have replaced open-heart surgery as the treatment of choice for children born with certain heart defects and for adults discovered to have those congenital defects later in life. The devices are wire-mesh units filled with polyester fabric that deploy into a shape like a pair of cymbals or a double umbrella connected by a central shaft. Usually, they are introduced into the patient’s chest via a catheter that runs up through a blood vessel from the groin. AGA Medical’s flagship product, the Amplatzer Septal Occluder, is used to close an atrial septal defect—a hole in the wall between the upper chambers of the heart.

“Kurt Amplatz completely changed the way we care for children born with something wrong with their hearts,” says Dr. John L. Bass, director of pediatric cardiology at the University of Minnesota. Repairing the defects by surgery when a child is two or three years old produces a kid who “is lying in bed with a chest tube the next day and has a big scar,” Bass says. With the occluder technique, “the kids go home the day after it’s put in. I usually have to catch them on the ward; they’re running up and down the halls playing.”

Amplatz was born in 1924 in Weistrach, Austria, where his father was the village doctor. But Amplatz was delivered by a midwife. This comes up while he’s explaining that about 90 percent of AGA’s occluders are placed in children; most adult patients are in developing countries, having been delivered by midwives who had no way to detect congenital heart defects.

He was a tinkerer and experimenter as a boy, and he planned to become a chemist. At the university in Innsbruck, Austria, “I tried to study medicine and chemistry at the same time,” Amplatz says. “Then they had the first examination in medicine, and I almost flunked. So I knew nobody can do that. I gave up chemistry and stayed with medicine.”