97-year-old Dutch-born doctor Willem J. Kolff, the pioneer in the field of artificial organs and kidney dialysis, died following congestive heart failure in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania.
“Dr. Kolff was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word. His groundbreaking work on the artificial kidney in the 1940s made him a household name and a hero to millions of people around the world who benefited from this life-saving technology,” stated Michael K. Young, President of the University of Utah.
Dr. Kolff invented the first artificial kidney during World War II using sausage casings made of cellophane, and orange juice cans. He saved innumerable human lives by virtue of his exemplary inventions.
Born in the Netherlands on Valentine’s Day in 1911, Kolff pursued his studies in medicine at the University of Leiden in 1930. He became an assistant at the University of Groningen after graduating in 1938. It was here that he found an interest in developing artificial kidney for those suffering from kidney failure.
Kolff made up his mind to find a treatment for kidney failure after he witnessed the death of a 22-year-old man from kidney failure. Kolff felt miserable when he had to break the news to the patient’s mother who was dressed “in a black dress and a little white cap like the farm women have.
“My first patient at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands was a 22-year-old boy who died from renal kidney failure,” he told Ohio Today Online in 2003. “I realized if I could remove 22 cc's of urea from him each day, then I could save his life.”
His research traced a paper published by a Johns Hopkins University pharmacologist in 1913, which explained the procedure for blood dialysis of dogs and rabbits.
Although, the first 16 patients he treated died, yet he persisted and went on get a breakthrough in August 1945 when he was successful in saving a 65-year-old woman, Maria Schafstad, who was in coma due to renal failure. She lived for six more years before dying of causes unrelated to her kidney problems.
Known as “the father of the artificial organ,” he was as a mentor to Robert Jarvik and other pioneers.
In 2002, Dr. Kolff received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, one of the highest honors in American medicine, for his work on kidney dialysis.
The fact that the man who worked hard for decades to develop the artificial device and finally made medical history by placing the world’s first artificial heart into the chest of Seattle dentist Barney Clark, failed to win the Nobel Prize, is a question which will continue to strike many minds.
DeVries, a noted surgeon at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, said, “It's always been a mystery to me. He was certainly deserving.” DeVries was roped by Kolff into his team of doctors at the University of Utah and their work made headlines in 1982 when they placed the device in the chest of Barney Clark.
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