On October 10, 2002, Dr. Robert (Bob) Borkenstein passed away at the age of 90. He can appropriately be called the "Father" of the International Council on Alcohol, Drugs and Traffic Safety (ICADTS). He attended the first meeting of what was to become ICADTS in 1950 and provided the leadership and inspiration for organizing its international meetings through the next four decades.

Founding a worldwide scientific organization is a remarkable achievement for an individual who began his career without completing a 4-year college program. However, Bob combined an innovative technical talent with a broad interest in science and an enthusiasm for international issues in criminal justice and traffic safety. He began his professional life as a police photographer and rapidly advanced as a criminal justice technician with the Indiana State Police. He wound up his 22-year police career as a Captain, heading the Indiana State Police Forensics Laboratory. Then, from 1958 to his retirement in 1983, he was a professor and Chairman of the Department of Police Science at the University of Indiana. Although he is best known for the development of the Breathalyzer(tm), he invented several novel devices throughout his career, including a color-sensing system for inspecting precision parts on bomb bay doors for which he received a special award from the British government in 1997.

Robert Borkenstein made two seminal contributions to the field of alcohol safety: (1) the invention of the Breathalyzer(tm) and (2) the conduct of the "Grand Rapids" study of the relative risk of a crash produced by a driver's blood alcohol concentration (BAC). Bob was not the first to invent a breath-alcohol-measuring device, but he was the first to invent an instrument so simple that any policy officer could use it with high accuracy and minimal training. This greatly increased the efficiency of the arrest process by avoiding the need to call a special technician to take a blood sample and eliminating the delay waiting for the laboratory result. Although only one of several research efforts to compare the BACs of crash-involved drivers with drivers using the roads at the same times and places to determine the relative risk of crash involvement, the Grand Rapids study was one of the earliest and largest studies of its kind and had a strong influence on impaired driving laws in the United States and abroad.

These achievements brought invitations to international conferences. Bob used his many contacts with foreign researchers to organize follow-up meetings to the original ICADTS conference in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1950. He played an important role in organizing the 1953 meeting in Toronto and the 1962 meeting in London. In 1965 he hosted the ICADTS meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. From 1969 to 1983, he served as president of ICADTS and was instrumental in arranging invitations for ICADTS meetings in Freiberg, Germany (1969); Toronto, Canada (1974); Melbourne, Australia (1977); Stockholm, Sweden (1980); and San Juan, Puerto Rico (1983). Beginning in 1963, the presidency passed on to others, but Bob remained active in planning and participating in ICADTS meetings through the 1986 meeting in Amsterdam, the 1989 meeting in Chicago, and the 1992 meeting in Cologne.

In the early years of the organization, Bob recruited the leading workers in the field to serve on the ICADTS executive committee and financed the cost of the communications and, in some cases, the executive committee meetings themselves from his Breathalyzer(tm) royalties. Bob had a great appreciation for the work being done in countries outside the United States and worked hard to establish an organization that would include strong participation from scientists throughout the world. He attempted to ensure that the meeting venues moved back and fourth across the four main areas of impaired driving research (Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States), and made an attempt to reach out to Latin America by organizing a meeting in Puerto Rico in 1983. He also initiated the sponsorship of satellite meetings on specific topics such as the meeting on roadside surveys in Umea, Sweden, in 1980.

Another contribution of Bob Borkenstein to ICADTS was the establishment of the Widmark Award, which is presented to individuals and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to the field of impaired driving. It was Bob's belief that ICADTS should include professionals from all relevant fields-medicine, law, public health, psychology, economics, public information, and law enforcement-as well as public officials active in the development and implementation of impaired driving policy. This has been reflected in some of the Widmark Organizational awardees, which have included The U.S. National Safety Council (NSC), The British Medical Association (BMA), and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).

Aside from playing a central role in the development of the organization, Borkenstein presented many provocative papers at ICADTS meetings that influenced policy making in the United States and abroad. His report at the Toronto meeting in 1974 on enforcement of driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol indicated that the average officer made only two impaired driving arrests a year and suggested that there might be as many as 2,000 alcohol-impaired trips for each arrest. Although the level of enforcement in the United States has increased since that time, the low probability of being apprehended for impaired driving remains a significant problem in the United States. To more actively involve all officers in impaired driving enforcement, Borkenstein proposed the adoption of a law that would establish an additional sanction for a moving traffic violation aggravated by alcohol that could be added to speeding or red-light-running citations when a police officer determined that the driver had been drinking but was not over the legal limit. That idea was never implemented; however, with impaired driving deaths increasing in the United States, it merits consideration.

Bob Borkenstein left an important legacy to the field of impaired driving through his demonstration that rapid and valid breath-test measurements could be made by ordinary police officers. This led to the adoption of a breath sample as the method of choice for the enforcement of BAC limits in most countries and to the rapid development of small handheld preliminary breath sensors that provided the basis for random-testing programs around the world. He also left to his scientific colleagues an important instrument for the promotion and dissemination of research: the International Congress on Alcohol, Drugs and Traffic Safety.