Billy's Lines Of Gibberish

Willem Kolff, The Dutch Tinkerer

Saturday, April 18, 2009 by Billy

The 1944 version of the Kolff' rotating drum artificial kidney

Willem (Pim) Kolff died a few weeks ago. You probably did not hear about it: he was not a pop singer, a famous actor or a professional football player, he was only a scientist whose work has been credited for saving millions of lives.
Granted, he was almost 98 year-old — it comes with no surprise when such an elderly person dies — and he was not unrecognised: Dr Kolff received many international awards, including the Lasker Award for Clinical Medical research, when he was... 91, probably because he was never given the Nobel Prize, which is a shame. Yet his death went almost unknown, especially by most of the people with end-stage renal failure who live thanks to his great first invention: the dialysis machine.
As a young doctor in Groningen in the Netherlands in the end-1930s, Willem Kolff witnessed the miserable, painful death of a 22-year-old man from kidney failure. He had to tell his mother that his only son was going to die, and there was nothing he could do. "If I only could find a way to remove toxic waste products from the poor guy's blood, I would save him", he thought. He then devoted himself to research on creating such a machine.
When Pim Kolff was a child, he was tinkering about all the time, so much so that his father arranged for him to have lessons with a carpenter on Saturdays afternoons. As an adult, he remained a handyman. He conducted his first experiments with sausage skins filled with blood and urea, that he put into a bath of salt water. Urea passed through the membrane from the blood to the salt water: the concept of using dialysis for building an artificial kidney was born.
It was only in 1941 though, when the Netherlands were under German occupation, that he succeeded in developing a prototype machine. Kolff had left Groningen in 1940, on the day a Dutch Nazi replaced his former Jewish professor as head of his department, and worked in a small hospital in Kampen, on the Zuiderzee (now called the Ijsselmeer).

Willem Kolff

Materials were in short supply at the time, and almost everything was requisitioned by the Germans. Kolff build his prototype with metal pieces from a downed fighter plane, a wooden drum, the cooling system from an old Ford, and 40 meters of sausage casings (later, he would also use orange juice cans and a washing machine).
The cellophane casings were wrapped around the drum and set into a salt solution. The patient's blood was drawn from a wrist artery and fed into the casings. The drum was rotated, removing impurities, and the Ford motor pumped back the blood into the patient.
In 1945, after 15 deaths and many modifications and improvements, the dialysis machine saved a patient for the first time. Ironically, it was a woman in a coma due to renal failure who had been imprisoned as a Nazi collaborator. After eleven hours of treatment, she awoke from coma, and lived seven more years. Hundreds of thousands of people now undergo dialysis several times a week.
Before he invented the kidney dialysis machine, Willem Kolff created the first blood blank in Europe, during the German bombings on The Hague in May 1940.

"If a man can grow a heart, he can build it"  Willem J. Kolff (1911-2009)

After he emigrated to the USA in the 1950s, he improved his dialysis machine, that was used worldwide for almost twenty years. He developed heart-lung machines used to oxygenate blood during cardiac surgery. In the 1970s, he was the leader of a team that developed the artificial heart. He was also involved in the development of artificial eyes, ears and limbs.

Posted in: books, health and medicine, history, Netherlands, USA | | |  

6 comment(s):

On 19 April, 2009 04:23 M said...

Willem (Pim) Kolff died a few weeks ago. You probably did not hear about it: he was not a pop singer, a famous actor or a professional football player Well, as he did not fit one of those categories, maybe if he'd gone on a 'reality' t.v program he could have raised his profile. I suspect that is the only other way to become known these days. (Okay, maybe I am a bit jaded, but it does feel that way at times).

I expect you are right, most people won't know. I confess I read the news and recognised the name but could not put it into context with what he'd achieved, and had to keep reading for clues. I do remember learning all about him at school in the '70's though. One of my classmates had a parent on dialysis, and the whole class did a project on the kidney machine. We even made models. Of course, a bunch of eight year olds did not cover the material in quite the detail you have.

Looking at his list of achievements it really is a shame that he is not widely recognised and honoured for his massive contribution to medicine and science.

 
On 19 April, 2009 14:18 Billy said...

Michelle - I only wanted to pay tribute here to one of the greatest scientists in the 20th century, especially because I am working in the area he opened many years ago. It appears just normal that people know essentially of people they hear about all the time, see on TV and such. That's part of the 'western civilization', is it not? Admittedly though I was surprised that most people on dialysis (I chatted about it with several patients of mine) had never heard his name before.

It's funny how we usually remember well about the projects, lectures, etc. we made when we were a child. Also, young children are usually empathetic with disabled people. Certainly your schoolmate having a parent on dialysis was a strong motivation for the classroom to read and learn about it.

 
On 20 April, 2009 08:59 M said...

Yes, it certainly does seem that people only know of people they are exposed to in the popular media these days. Every time I am out and about and here someone say something like, "Did you hear that (for example) Angelina and Brad Pitt are having problems with their four year old?" I want to scream. It frustrates me that with all the possibilities that having the world at your fingertips as a result of the internet, people are apparently becoming less engaged with history and culture(well, except popular culture, I suppose). Okay, that is my rant over. I sound like a grumpy old (or nearly middle-aged woman).

That surprises me a little, what you say about your patients. I cannot imagine undertaking something so life changing as dialysis, and not finding out something about the history of the machine that was going to be an integral part of my life.

I agree, children are far more empathetic with disabled people while they are young. I suspect it is partly because they are more open and curious, and haven't yet had society 'beat' that natural curiosity out of them.

 
On 20 April, 2009 14:56 M said...

Um. . that would be 'hear someone say.. . '

 
On 20 April, 2009 20:51 Vanessa Hahn said...

What an absolutely amazing man. To think that he used such limited and inadequate supplies with which to create his devices. I am very awed by everything he accomplished. I am not sure how his last days were lived, but he had to have felt some pride at saving so many lives and seeing the science of it advance. What a legacy!

I suppose the patients on dialysis did not know about the inventor for the same reason I do not know the name of the inventor of the engine or the toaster or the traffic light. We use them everyday but they have become part of our lives. Granted, I think being on dialysis would prompt me to delve further (at least I hope), but it is not too surprising to me that they do not know.

 
On 20 April, 2009 22:32 Billy said...

Vanessa - Agreed. Thinking again about it, I understood that people on dialysis use it as a technology that has existed for decades, like many other technologies. They see it as part of normal medicine (they are right), a treatment that makes them live, but is a burden also. Actually, I even had in mind the same comparison as you concerning the engine.

Michelle - You, Grumpy? Yikes. I thought you were Snow White? Maybe I am not Doc but Dopey, after all.