![]() Kolff had effectively built an artificial kidney. When the blood of the kidney patient passed through the tubing, as the drum rotated, the impurities percolated through the cellophane membrane while the purified blood could be returned to the patient’s system. In his laboratory there, he wrapped cellophane tubing around a horizontal drum, which had been partially immersed in saline solution. ![]() Kolff’s work in Groningen was interrupted by the Nazi invasion in 1940, and he removed to Kampen to continue it. Blood cells would not, being too large to pass through the porous membrane. He found that waste materials in the bloodstream, which are normally removed by the kidneys, would seep through extremely thin cellophane casings (such as those used to wrap sausage) when the casings were submerged in a saline bath. Kolff dug obsessively through medical libraries searching for a clue that might lead him to a method for cleansing blood, and he began laboratory experiments on the problem. I thought if we could only remove some of the waste products from his blood he might survive and live a normal life.” “I had the awful task,” Kolff recalls, “of telling this sobbing peasant woman that her only son could not be saved. During postgraduate work at the hospital of the University of Groningen, the 29-year-old doctor was given charge of four patients-one a young man of 22 who was dying slowly from kidney failure. Nevertheless, his father’s intense dedication to the profession impressed young Willem, and in 1930, at the age of 19, he enrolled at the University of Leyden Medical School. “The thought of having a career where I would have to watch people die troubled me,” he recalls, “so much so that I once seriously considered becoming a good zoo keeper.” With such prostheses or artificial members, an amputee could recover both motor functions and a sense of touch.Īs a young man in Holland, Kolff was repulsed by suffering and death, which he witnessed more frequently than most boys because his father was a physician. Kolff’s team is now working on an artificial ear and on limbs that will attach not only to the skeleton of the patient but also to his central nervous system. The “eyes” were implanted in a totally blind Vietnam veteran, who was able to perceive blurry shapes. In addition to an artificial heart that kept a calf alive for 94 days, the researchers have created artificial eyes-actually miniaturized television cameras implanted in the eye sockets-which transmit pictures to the brain. Kolff says the work at the school is aimed only at making life more bearable for the physically handicapped, but if TV’s artificial Six Million Dollar Man were ever to become a reality, doubtless it would be the work of the Utah group. And in just seven years as director of Utah’s Division of Artificial Organs, he has almost single handedly created the foremost research team of its kind in the world. In 35 years of remarkable innovation, beginning with a machine that does the work of the human kidney, Kolff has pioneered in the field of artificial organs. Willem Kolff, 64, who directed the project. If the atomic battery-powered heart does work, it will be the capstone of one of modern medicine’s most illustrious careers for Dr. Sometime this year doctors at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City will implant an artificial heart in a human-and for the first time the chances for success are very high. Scott’s article in the FebruPeople magazine. Willem Kolff and his colleagues there were already eager to perform the procedure, as evidenced by Ronald B. ![]() Seven years before the first AHT occurred at the University of Utah Medical Center, Dr. The same questions will arise should a greater understanding of genetics allow us to drive evolution. “I was surprised that people think it’s as big a deal as they think it is,” DeVries said later in the year. A stunning media circus ensued, with the Frankenstein factor riling many Americans, as cutting-edge technology was introduced before old dreams and superstitions had been put to rest. William DeVries performed the first artificial-heart transplant on patient Barney Clark, who lived 112 days with the battery-powered pumper. Also it’s the organ in your chest that pumps blood through your veins and arteries.Īn old metaphor ran up against new medicine in 1982 when Dr. ![]()
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