It's usually people who quit regular jobs to follow their passion make news; but here is somebody who moved from a government organisation to the business sector to pursue, quite literally, matters of the heart!

Prof. A V Ramani (pic: Deepa Mohan)

Professor AV Ramani is unusual by any standards. Educated to be a chemical engineer with a wide knowledge of material sciences, he taught metallurgy at IIT, Madras. Also experienced with electrochemical technology, he put in 11 years, from 1968 to 1979, at National Aeronautical Laboratories (NAL), Bangalore, where he became conversant with non-conventional processes like spark erosion.

What would all that knowledge be focused on? One amazing product... a completely indigenous heart-valve, to market which he moved to Bangalore.

What are the origins of this heart valve, and what are Prof. Ramani's associations with it? How did the process of manufacturing and marketing move to Bangalore? These were the questions I asked Prof. Ramani.

"To begin the story, we must go back to when Dr. Valianathan, an orthopaedic surgeon who trained in the US as a cardiac surgeon, found that in India, 6 out of every 1000 children had rheumatic fever, which resulted in permanent damage to their heart valves," says Prof. Ramani. "A figure of 6 per 1000 may not sound frightening by itself, unless you realise that with our population, it means millions of children with permanent heart damage.

The imported heart valves that were available were very expensive indeed, costing from $800 to $1100 each; well beyond what the average family in India could afford. So Dr. Valiathan came back to India in the early sixties, and joined IIT, Madras, in the bio-medical activity, where he came into contact with Prof. Ramaseshan. But since, at the time, medicine and engineering were hardly finding a meeting point, the doctor went back to Trivandrum, Kerala, where the Chitra Medical Centre was being set up under the state government. Here he started work on developing the heart valve so that he could accomplish both import substitution and directly help the children from the economically weaker sections of society.

Dr. Valiathan became the first Director of the Advisory Committee to the Chitra Thirunal Institute (CTI) and Prof. S. Ramaseshan was the Chairman of the Committee. Prof. Ramani, at the time, was working in NAL, Bangalore, under Prof. Ramaseshan.

Prof. Ramani had already been working with aerospace materials and machines in NAL. Titanium and aerospace alloys were difficult to machine (yes, it is the correct expression) on conventional machines, and when the question of developing the indigenous heart valve came up, he was a natural choice for the job. Dr Valiathan approached him and Prof. Ramani moved from Bangalore to Trivandrum, quitting his NAL post, rather than try out the job for a year, as was suggested. For 11 years, from 1979 to 1990, he worked at the Chitra Thirunal Institute with his team trying out various materials and designs for the heart valve. "It is not often that one has an opportunity to work on something that will directly alleviate some problems of poor people," he says. "Children from the poorer section of society are the ones affected by the rheumatic fever and the resultant heart valve damage when they are not treated properly for the fever."

Deepa Mohan is a freelance writer who fell in love with Bangalore when first she moved from Chennai, and has been both enthused and worried over the rapidly changing city. She is also a Bangalore metroblogger.

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