Biography

Bert was born April 29, 1939 and lived his childhood in the village of Beilen, the Netherlands where his father was the mayor of a nearby village. Bert's subsequent political tact and skill at diplomacy may have resulted from his father's profession. He passed the preliminary doctoral examination in medicine at the State University in Groningen in 1963 and then performed research on cardiac pacing, then in its infancy. He completed a doctoral thesis in 1969 which was sufficiently creative and original to be published and widely distributed with the title of "The Artificial Cardiac Pacemaker" and was co-sponsored by professors JW Van den Berg, JN Homan van der Heide and J. Nieven. This first European volume on the topic established a standard of careful laboratory research and practical clinical application that remains a medical milestone, especially of the technology of the then new field. He remained active in the department of medical physics throughout medical training, eventually contributing to the development of pacemaker leads and electrodes and what became known as the Groningen pacemaker-later the first model of implantable pacemaker manufactured by the Dutch firm Vitatron. In addition to his own original and important research, he supported the development of the QT principal, the operational basis of the first commercially available rate modulated pacemaker.

Following publication of his thesis and book he was a central contributor to the development of cardiac pacing throughout Europe. In 1973 he was the organizer and Secretary-General of a World Symposium of Cardiac Pacing in Groningen, then the largest ever held. At that time he fostered the founding of the International Cardiac Pacing and Electrophysiology Society (ICPES) to be the sponsor of subsequent quadrennial World Symposia, an organization which functions to this day and has designated world symposia numbers twelve (2003) and thirteen (2007) in Hong Kong and Rome respectively. During the establishment of the ICPES, Thalen urged the retrospective designation of three earlier major pacemaker conferences as World Symposia. He was President of the Dutch Working Group on Cardiac Pacing from 1973 until his death except for 1974-1975 during which he spent a year working and studying at Massachusetts General Hospital with J Warren Harthorne. He was Chairman of the European Working Group on Cardiac Pacing between 1976-1980 and a member of its nucleus group thereafter. During this time he was instrumental in developing the European Pacemaker Passport, still routinely used, a document which allowed patients who traveled to carry data about their implanted pacemaker for use in the event of medical need.

He traveled widely throughout the Far East and Eastern Europe where he was influential in urging the development of arrhythmia management by implantable devices, and the development of national and regional pacemaker organizations, all perhaps made possible because he was not a national of a major power. There were few European or international conferences in which he did not participate as a member of the Scientific or Organizing committee. At the Fifth International Symposium on Cardiac Pacing in Tokyo, 1976 he and Mrs. Thalen were one of two foreign couples presented to the Japanese Royal Family.

He had advanced to Professorial rank when he died suddenly of an exacerbation of a congenital illness.

- J. Warren Harthorne

Lecture Excerpt

Future trends in Cardiac Pacing (2:44 sec.; Real Audio)

Excerpted from this lecture:
Recorded lecture titled: Future Trends in Cardiac Pacing
Date: Circa 1982
Place: Hawaii
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