KEITH COPELAND: AN IFMBE LEGENDYounger participants in regional European IFMBE meetings like MEDICON or the Nordic Baltic Conferences probably have noticed an elderly gentleman, always ready for a quick smile and a friendly word, and may have wondered who he might be. His name is Keith Copeland and he is not only one of the true pioneers of Biomedical Engineering, but one of the Founding Members and an Honorary Life Member of the IFMBE and he has been the Federation’s Treasurer for fourteen years. From Radar to Biomedical EngineeringKeith Copeland was born on the 28th of August 1921 in Bury St. Edmunds, UK, and received his education at Cullford School in Suffolk. After passing the examination for the civil service, he started his professional life in the Air Ministry in the Works Directorate on the maintenance of aerodromes and was then called up to the Royal Air Force and for training as a radio wireless mechanic. In 1941 he was summoned to war and was employed at numerous radar stations all over England. One of the places was Farnborough, where research was carried out at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE). Later he was sent to the Isle of Wight where he witnessed D-Day. Keith and his colleagues were then stationed near Bombay and Poona in India, where he continued working on special radar equipment that was used for navigating aircraft coming from Europe. When the war was over he returned to England and to his job at the Air Ministry until he was offered a position in the Biophysics Department of the University College London. It was the year 1947 when neither hospitals nor research facilities had sufficient equipment, so Keith started working to design and develop instruments for physiological research, and many of his devices, such as simulators, ended up in hospital use. Today we would call somebody doing this kind of work a Biomedical Engineer. IFMBE: Foundation and Early YearsOver the next years, Keith Copeland became acquainted with others working in the same field, some of whom even had the same background, and they started to call their research Medical Electronics. Like everywhere else, there was no professional biomedical engineering society in England at the time, there were only the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), and the British Institution of Radio Engineers that later became part of the IEE. Therefore communication among those working in Medical Electronics was loose even within a country and there was no globally established network. It was Dr. Vladimir K. Zworykin who sought to change this situation and to encourage the development of the profession further by establishing an international framework for communication and collaboration. In June of 1958, about 50 leading scientists in the new field, Keith Copeland among them, met in Paris to prepare the foundation of "The International Federation for Medical Electronics" and the new Federation’s first conference. The meeting became known as the "First International Conference on Medical Electronics" and the participants represented 9 countries. The next meeting again took place in Paris a year later and Zworykin became the first president of the newly established Federation. In 1961 it was decided that the Federation should publish its own journal, "The International Journal of Medical Electronics and Biological Engineering", now known under the name "Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing", and Dr. Alfred Nightingale became the first editor. Unfortunately, he died in February 1963, shortly before the first issue was published and the position was passed on to Dr. Peter Donaldson who kept it for 5 years. After his term ended there was the decision to appoint an editor and pay him a salary, however, this experiment did not prove very successful since the new editor received many papers but did not edit them. A solution had to be found and so in 1970 Dennis Hill, who was the Treasurer at this time, took over the editorship of the journal in addition to his original responsibilities for the Federation's finances. The Treasurer (1971-1985)By the time the 9th International Conference of the Federation took place in Melbourne in 1971, Dennis Hill resigned as Treasurer. Keith Copeland, Secretary General of the Biological Engineering Society (BES) of the UK at the time, attended the meeting and was asked – quite unexpectedly, as he says himself - to become the new Treasurer. Keith agreed and he kept that position for 14 years, which meant a tremendous lot of continuity for the Federation and its financial matters. Traditionally, the Federation's Journal had always been published in the UK and since one of the responsibilities of the Treasurer was negotiating the contracts with the publisher, it was preferential that the Treasurer should also reside in the UK. In addition, British banks had the reputation of being particularly stable. Keith transferred the Federation's account from a bank on the outskirts of London to Lloyds Bank in the City, where it exists to this day, and in 1985, after long negotiations with the British Office of Revenue, obtained tax-exempt status for IFMBE. Keith Copeland resigned from office in 1985, and during the same year the IFMBE made him Honorary Life Member. During Keith's term as treasurer the Federation grew from 15 member societies to 28 and membership dues became an important source of income in addition to the journal subscriptions. The International Conferences had settled into a regular biannual rhythm and, starting in 1973, the Federation began to sponsor Regional Conferences as well, the first ones in Europe being the Nordic Baltic Conferences, which had started under the name Nordic Meeting on BME in 1970, and MEDICON starting in 1977. Keith has attended all the Mediterranean as well as the Nordic Baltic Meetings. He enjoys these smaller regional meetings because they usually have a personal touch, good hospitality and are all distinctive since their character is much influenced by the ideas of the organizers. About Changes in BME and its Federation: the Better and the WorseIn the beginning the Federation was very personal with only few members since the development of what we now call biomedical engineering was just starting. A concept of the Federation then was to bring together the people who worked in the field and had a variety of different backgrounds with physicians to form beneficial cooperation and to solve the traditional communication problem between Engineering and Medicine. The idea was that the medical doctors knew best what they needed and the engineers had the know-how and experience to realize it. Keith Copeland thinks it is distressing that the Federation, while continuously growing overall, has fewer and fewer members with a medical background and no physicians on the Council. He feels that this may be the reason for some of the presentations he listened to during MEDICON 2004 being much too theoretical - or, as he phrased it: "these authors have not even been near a hospital" - and that closer cooperation between the two fields would be desirable. As compared to its early years Biomedical Engineering has grown enormously, with regard to the number of professionals working in the area as well as research areas. For many of the new fields special societies spring up and there is an imminent danger that Biomedical Engineering may fragment. Therefore Keith Copeland much approves of the fact that IFMBE now allows more than one society per country to be a member of the Federation. The original concept for the Federation of bringing people together still stands today and is as valid as it was in 1959. Another important goal of the Founding Members had been to attain recognition and respect for Biomedical Engineering. This has definitely been achieved, culminating in IUPESM and thus IFMBE becoming full member of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) in 2002. We must give Keith Copeland thanks for so many achievements and hope to see him in good health at this year's Nordic-Baltic Conference in Umeå, Sweden. Monika Nagel This article is based on an interview Mr. Keith Copeland granted the author during MEDICON 2004 in Ischia.
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