Biography

Motokazu Hori was born in 1929 in Japan and was educated at the University of Tokyo School of Medicine (MD, 1954) and trained in Surgery at the University of Tokyo Hospital, studying under one of the founders of Japanese cardiovascular surgery, the late Prof. Setji Kimoto. During1962-1964 he was a Fulbright Scholar at Massachusetts General Hospital. After returning home, he occupied the post of Professor of Surgery at the Heart Institute of Japan at the Tokyo Women’s Medical University. Upon finishing active academic surgery career, he became one of the founding faculty at the University of Tsukuba, a new university founded 50 miles north from Tokyo in 1973 as Associate Dean for Education of the School of Medicine, soon rising to be Dean and later to Vice President of the University of Tsukuba. After retirement in 1994, he remained active as President of the Japan Society for Medical Education.

During his early research work in the mid-1950s he was heavily involved in the development of a bio-artificial liver and temporary substitute of the liver for hepatic coma, developing gel-form cellophane membrane modules and bio-reactors by the use of "live" animals to detoxify and purify the blood of patient in hepatic coma through the mechanism of cross hemo-dialysis between "live" animals’ hepatic circulation and patient’s systemic circulation. This was the world’s first successful bio-artificial liver and reported at the 1959 ASAIO meeting. The second major research project was that of development of a cardiac pacemaker, necessitated in Japan as elsewhere by the complications of open heart surgery in the 1960s. These were built by several engineering groups since 1963 when implantation of wholly contained Japanese designed pacemakers were initially performed with Kozo Suma. In 1973 at the IV International Pacemaker Symposium in Groningen, The Netherlands, Dr. Hori proposed that the next such meeting three years later be in Tokyo, Japan. Those two international meetings eventually became the fourth and fifth World Symposia of Cardiac Pacing, for which the Japanese Society of Cardiac Pacing was established by Hori and his associates. Now the Japanese Society has grown with more than three thousand members and is one of the major cooperative societies of ICPES.

Interview Excerpt

Developing handmade implantable cardiac pacemakers in Japan. (2:52 sec.; Real Audio)

Excerpted from this interview:
Interviewer: Seymour Furman, MD
Date: August 14, 1996
Place: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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