Hetling featured on Perpetual Motion Podcast
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Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor John Hetling was recently featured on Perpetual Motion, an innovation and invention podcast.
The podcast is hosted by Colin M. Fowler and Michael A. Glenn, patent attorneys at Perkins Coie, who interview inventors and technology pioneers on exciting innovations and inventorship-related topics. Perkins Coie is an international law firm that represents clients at the forefront of technological change.
On the podcast, Hetling, Fowler, and Glenn discussed Hetling’s ground-up process for teaching future inventors, his startup, RetMap, and his research to address eye diseases and health issues through novel approaches. Hetling’s ground-up process revolves around the idea that once students understand the fundamentals, they will have a good foundation for proceeding to higher-level things.
“When I teach instrumentation, I have students build a biopotential amplifier, even though very few of them are ever going to build another amplifier after that class, they’re going to buy one premade instead,” Hetling said. “But in the process of choosing the right biopotential amplifier, you need to know what’s inside. It helps you troubleshoot.”
Hetling said that this passion for inventing came from his father, who worked as a plumber for their family business, Hetling Brothers Plumbing and Heating.
“My father was an inventor,” Hetling said. “He didn’t have his name on a patent in his whole life, but he certainly solved problems with creative solutions. Having your name on a patent is just a legal definition of being an inventor.”
Hetling explained that from a young age, he would follow his father around on plumbing jobs and learned the trade. He also worked under his father’s license in high school, and they did a lot together. His father also did all their home improvements and renovations, with Hetling helping with little projects.
“Anytime I got into a situation where I needed help and wanted guidance, the only two responses my father ever gave were ‘let me show you again’ or ‘let me do it,’” Hetling said. “Consistently for my whole life, that was the feedback I got. I knew I needed to figure it out and that I was capable, if I just put my mind to it, that set the groundwork for the confidence to persevere when people told me I was wasting my time or it wasn’t going to work. But the people I was surrounded with, trades people are very resourceful.”
Hetling’s career as a professor began doing fundamental experiments, mostly related to vision. Then, it evolved into building better tools for research by building systems that stimulate visual systems. After having done that for a while, he realized his inventions’ clinical potential.
He realized these systems could help somebody, but they would never cross that threshold unless it’s commercialized. Hetling spent a lot of time on intellectual property development and formed Ret Map as a conduit, a way to commercialize some of these ideas. Now, Ret Map is a company with an FDA-cleared device and shippable products.
Hetling’s PhD in vision science laid the foundation for his research on electroretinography.
“When I began my PhD, I inherited a project from a lab mate that I wasn’t quite comfortable with,” Hetling said. “After a year of floundering in that project, my advisor suggested switching to electroretinography. It was something he wanted to start in the lab, although purchasing an electroretinography system would be almost $150,000. I suggested he build one instead and my advisor gave me the time and the freedom to do that, and I built an EEG system for mice, which worked well and was used for the next four years.”