Acceptance Remarks by Dr. Ian Alexander Shanks

President Anderson, Vice President Leo, members of the Russ family and the NAE, ladies and gentlemen—I would like, most sincerely, to thank the National Academy of Engineering and Ohio University for their roles in administering and funding the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize in Bioengineering and for honoring me with this most prestigious award from this august international organization. This award is in recognition of my invention of the enzyme biosensor, called the electrochemical capillary fill device (eCFD), and I am delighted to accept this top international award in bioengineering. This marks the first time it has been awarded to a UK engineer. I thank each and every one of you for being here on this auspicious occasion. I feel truly humbled.

I also wish to thank the Russ family for the vision and generosity of Fritz and Dolores in creating and supporting the prize and helping plug the gap left by the absence of a Nobel Prize for Engineering. 

I would particularly like to acknowledge and thank Cyril Hilsum, a brilliant international member of the NAE, for nominating me for this signal honor and, also, my supporters who provided their personal assessments of both me and the impact of my invention. 

I also wish to thank “Young, Deborah”—as she appears many times in my inbox—for her advice and guidance on getting me here on time and in good order and for supervising the dinner, the paperwork, the presentation, and much else. Thank you, Deborah, and to your colleagues and contacts! Finally, I would like to acknowledge the help, tolerance, and support provided by Janice, my wife, without which I would not be here today. Thank you, Janice!

Like Fritz, I also came from a working family. A Scot from modest beginnings, I graduated with a BSc in electrical engineering from the University of Glasgow and went on to work for my government, conducting research in the then little-known field of liquid crystals. 
Simplicity and cost were at the core of my invention of the eCFD. Having conducted pioneering research on liquid crystal displays (LCDs) for 10 years, I moved to Unilever to initiate research in biosensors—a field that combined the devices of physics with the molecules of biology. This “out of the box” thinking resulted in an innovation that integrated the physical sciences with engineering and biology.

I was able to learn enough about the latter to draw on my expert knowledge of LCDs to envision how the mass manufacture of digital watch LCD displays could be adapted to create many billions of inexpensive, accurate, and simple-to-use blood glucose biosensor test strips that could be used by diabetics, easily, rapidly, and virtually painlessly, to self-test their own blood glucose levels and avoid the often-dire consequences of their disease. 

Although Unilever patented the eCFD, it chose not to exploit the invention, but after 12 years of simply keeping it in force, they granted fully paid-up licenses, on request, for the eCFD to be manufactured and sold by a wide range of medical product companies around the world, including many based here in the United States. This underpinned the creation of a world market with sales measured in hundreds of billions of dollars and has enabled hundreds of millions of diabetics globally to monitor and control their affliction.

There is also a legal dimension to this story. In 2019, after 13 years of financially and reputationally perilous litigation, the UK Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, awarded me substantial compensation from Unilever, as a fair share of their outstanding benefit from licensing the eCFD patents. This also established legal precedent for how the UK 1977 Patents Act should be interpreted in the future, thus inspiring and incentivizing future UK employee inventors. This was the first such award in over 40 years. 

I’m pleased that the diabetes test strip I invented still remains, in a variety of proprietary forms and about 30 years later, the gold standard for controlling the disease and for checking the calibration of the new, wearable, continuous glucose monitor products now on the market.

Slightly paraphrasing Sir Winston Churchill’s dictum on the characteristics of a good speech, I have tried to make these remarks short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the essentials!

Thank you again for being here and listening to me, and thank you again to the NAE for awarding me this outstanding prize.