Whitehead Institute - Making clinical progress

Making clinical progress

In the late nineteenth century, Jack’s grandfather Abraham Weiskopf started a firm that sold lab equipment, mostly glassware imported from Germany. After World War I, Jack’s father took over the business, renamed it Technicon, and slowly built up a small line of innovative medical analysis equipment.

In the mid-1940s, around the time Jack joined Technicon, the company’s headliner was the AutoTechnicon, the world's first automated slide preparation machine. “By standardizing the preparation of medical slides for microscopic viewing, the AutoTechnicon moved histopathology from an art to a science and greatly advanced the accuracy of medical diagnoses,” says John Whitehead. “Two pathologists looking at a tissue could start to agree.”

“In the early years, the company’s success was limited,” recalls Henry Allen, a cousin who later worked for Technicon. “Jack gradually eased himself into the position of power. He and his father sat at desks that faced each other. They argued a great deal, but somehow they got along.”

“Jack was a tough cookie,” Allen adds. “He was difficult to work for and to work with at times, but he usually was right. Not everyone loved him every moment, but they respected him.”

“He was very smart, very curious, very energetic, and optimistic enough to want to try finding new solutions to old medical problems,” says John Whitehead. Among the results were devices that greatly speeded up chromatography, freed a generation of polio victims from the prison of iron lungs, introduced modern electrocardiography, and made large-scale battlefield blood transfusions practical, he says.

Technicon remained mildly profitable but small—until the AutoAnalyzer hit the market in 1957.

With its offbeat design, based on analyzing a stream of blood samples separated by air bubbles, the AutoAnalyzer did away with the slow, clumsy and error-prone manual approaches to blood analysis. “You could automatically test the samples and get answers in minutes rather than days,” says Henry Allen. “The quality of analyses enormously advanced; you could do hundreds or thousands of tests relatively inexpensively and very reliably.”

This was a genuine breakthrough, and after painful experiences with Technicon’s other innovations, Whitehead knew how to capitalize on it. The AutoAnalyzer proved successful in clinical use and the results were presented in public conferences. Its customers received in-depth training on how to use it properly, and Technicon swiftly backed up its patent rights in court. Over the years, industrial uses (such as water quality studies) emerged for the device and its successors.

Technicon “made laboratory testing reliable and timely, and thereby a fundamental part of modern medicine,” says John Whitehead. “Its annual business rapidly grew to tens, and then hundreds of millions.”

When his father died in 1968, Jack Whitehead inherited a large company, and one with essentially no debt.

“The rapid expansion of the business and the growth of its U.S. rental base required large cash investments, so the company went public in 1969 to raise the required capital,” says John Whitehead. “Following the public offering, my dad had his first taste of very real, tangible and great personal wealth. With that wealth came a dream of sharing some of it with the community that had made it all possible. And so the idea of a research institute was born.”