#78: Keith Mullett — Medtronic, pain, and the prehistory of modern DBS

In this episode of Stimulating Brains, I speak with Keith R. Mullett, who can uniquely tell a part of the DBS history that is often skipped. We often begin the story of modern DBS in Grenoble around 1987, when Alim-Louis Benabid and colleagues showed that high-frequency VIM stimulation could suppress tremor. Keith reminds us that Medtronic's first DBS system had already been implanted in 1969, not for tremor or Parkinson's disease, but for severe chronic pain. Keith joined Medtronic in May 1972 and spent 37 years there, first in Minneapolis and later at the Bakken Research Center in Maastricht, where he arrived shortly after Frans Gielen. The conversation goes back before the Benabid era, into the period when Medtronic and its physician collaborators built the devices, surgical know-how, clinical relationships, and regulatory experience that later made DBS for movement disorders possible. We discuss Yoshio Hosobuchi and the first pain implants, RF systems with belt-worn transmitters, the transition from cardiac pacing to neurostimulation, the FDA call for data, ITREL, the Bakken Research Center, and the 1992 tremor study: the moment Keith describes as "the rest is history." This episode also connects to our recent conversations with Todd Langevin (episode 46) and Frans Gielen (episode 75). Todd described the internal venturing and business side of DBS after Benabid, while Frans described the engineering, clinical studies, training, imaging, and new indications that followed. Keith, who was Frans' boss, helps us ask what had to exist inside Medtronic before those later teams could build the modern field.