Itzhak Bentov

Itzhak "Ben" Bentov was an Israeli American scientist, inventor, mystic, and author. His many inventions, including the steerable cardiac catheter, helped pioneer the biomedical engineering industry. He was also an early proponent of what has come to be referred to as consciousness studies and authored several books on the subject.

Bentov was killed in the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 shortly after takeoff from Chicago O'Hare Airport in 1979, which remains the worst non-terrorism-related aviation disaster to have taken place on US soil. Bentov was born in Humenné, Czechoslovakia, in 1923. During World War II, his parents, his younger brother, and his sister were killed in Nazi concentration camps.

He narrowly escaped being sent to the camps and moved to British Palestine, first living on the Shoval kibbutz in the Negev. Despite not having a university degree, Bentov joined the Israeli Science Corps, which David Ben-Gurion incorporated into the Israeli Defense Forces one month before Israel declared statehood in 1948. The Science Corps became a military branch known by the Hebrew acronym HEMED. Bentov designed Israel's first rocket for the War of Independence. 

HEMED was forced to make improvised weapons as there was a worldwide embargo on selling weapons to the Jewish state. Bentov immigrated to the United States in 1954 and settled in Massachusetts. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1962. Bentov began with a workshop in the basement of a Catholic church in Belmont, Massachusetts, in the 1960s. In 1967, he built the steerable heart catheter and attracted the attention of businessman John Abele, with whom Bentov founded the Medi-Tech corporation in 1969.

Bentov had a daughter, Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, with his first wife, whom he would divorce. Later he married Ukrainian-born sculptor and poetess Mirtala Serhiivna Pylypenko-Kardinalovska (Kharkiv, 1929), also known as Mirtala Bentov.

Bentov was killed on May 25, 1979, as a passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 191 that crashed shortly after takeoff from O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. He was 55 years old. His daughter, English professor Sharona Ben-Tov Muir, wrote a memoir about her father, The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives, in 2005. It was not until after his death that she learned about his life in the Israeli Defense Forces and that he had created Israel's first rocket. Searching for answers as to why he never discussed this part of his life, Muir traveled to Israel and researched his years there.