Meet a pioneer in surgical robotics and telemedicine: Dr. Richard Satava

Posted by Chris Flanagan on July 9, 2008

I spent the holiday weekend with a close friend from Minnesota who is a physician. I happen to have a BIF-4 flyer lying around (ha-ha) and mentioned to my friend that Dr. Richard Satava was going to be one of our storytellers at the summit in the fall. Initially, the name didn't mean anything to her. Then I said he co-developed the first surgical robot. That's when her eyes lit up: "that's a serious game-changing surgical technology," she said.

I've profiled many storytellers over the years. Satava is prone to neither hyperbole nor rhetoric - but honestly, it's hard to tame down his story.

He's done many things in his life – from deciding which cutting-edge medical technologies the U.S. military will pursue, to saving lives as a surgeon in the heat of battle, to teaching surgery at Yale and the University of Washington, to serving on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy – yet he would have you believe that all his accomplishments stem from one thing: failure.

Failure Begets Purpose

In January 1958, when the United States launched its first satellite, Satava decided he wanted to be the first doctor to perform surgery in space. Later in his life, trying to make that dream a reality, he became an army astronaut candidate three years in a row but failed to make the grade.

So working instead at Stanford University and NASA, Satava helped build the first surgical robot, reasoning that even if he couldn’t perform surgery in space perhaps his creation could. He continued work on the robot after he joined the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); the technology ultimately was commercialized as the da Vinci Surgical System.

(Image is the daVinci Surgical Robot)

His work on advanced medical technologies eventually brought Satava into contact with computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who was working on a “virtual reality” concept that at the time must have seemed like something out of science fiction. Satava helped support the research that eventually led to the first virtual reality simulator.

“As I went along, it’s just that one failure led to the next led to the next,” says Satava. “I couldn’t go up into space and do the first surgery, so I had to find another way to do it. You go through one failure after another, and finally you get things done.”

It helps, of course, if you have a clear picture of where you’re going. From an early age, Satava set his sights on becoming a surgeon. Drafted into the military, he served four years in Heidelberg, Germany. He loved the opportunities that the army provided and decided to build a career out of it. In addition to stints in the surgery departments of Ford Ord, Calif., and Fort Gordon, Ga., Satava served as chief of surgery for a MASH unit during the 1983 invasion of Granada and as commander of an evacuation hospital in Saudi Arabia during 1991’s Operation Desert Storm.

“For a surgeon, especially a medical surgeon, the greatest experience you can have is to take care of your fellow soldiers during combat. It’s incomparable,” he says.

It was after Desert Storm that Satava joined DARPA as program manager in advanced biomedical technology; today, in addition to teaching and practicing surgery in Seattle, he is senior science advisor at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. Both at DARPA and in his current Pentagon role Satava’s work has involved “technology harvesting” – identifying new technologies that have the potential to change the face of medicine and bringing them under the military’s funding and research umbrella.

“What I have that other people don’t have is access to dozens if not hundreds of these advanced technologies,” he says.

To read Satava’s presentations is to glimpse a future in which robotics and other advances have radically transformed medicine as we know it: military dog-tags embedded with complete CT scans of each soldier, which medics or surgeons can refer to as a baseline if the soldier is injured; surgery performed remotely via robots managed from a surgical console; virtual reality training for surgeons; biosurgery that manipulates genetic material or operates directly upon genes; synthetically grown tissue and organs; intelligent prostheses; a completely automated operating room without any human medical personnel present.

About two-thirds of the new systems Satava describes in his papers are already in use in the military, he says; the rest are still being perfected in the laboratory and will be available in coming years.

“None of this is a dream. I don’t write anything down that I don’t have hard scientific proof on,” Satava says. “The question is which ones are going to move into the hospital or the battlefield and which ones aren’t going to make it.”
One of the main people providing an answer to that question is a man who never wavered in his childhood dream to be on the cutting edge of surgery. Failure, it seems, has never been so successful.

Related

• For a glimpse into the future and a deep-dive into Dr. Satava's work, check out his web page which contains links to all his recent papers and presentations. They're mind-blowing!

‹ prev | 137 / 408next ›