Willem Kolff, the father of the artificial organ, died at the age of 97. Kolff Dies at 97
Willem Kolff, the father of the artificial organ, has died at the age of 97
Willem? Dr. Willem Kolff died on Wednesday at his home in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, at the age of 97. Dr. Kolff was a Dutch physician who invented the first artificial kidney at a country hospital during World War II and has since continued research to prove that biomedical engineers can save patients' lives by creating all artificial organs, including the first artificial heart.
The University of Utah in Salt Lake City announced the death of Dr. Kolff. Dr. Kolff was a renowned retired professor of bioengineering, surgery and internal medicine at the university. His son, Therus, said his father died of natural causes.
Widely respected as the father of artificial organs, Dr. Kolff, who immigrated to the United States in 1950, invented the artificial kidney, which was later refined into the current dialysis machine, saving the lives of millions of patients who needed hemodialysis because of kidney failure.
His invention of the membrane oxygenator, which provided a way to add oxygen to the bloodstream, is still used in heart-lung machines used during direct intracardiac surgery. His invention of the artificial heart, though named after his colleague Dr. Robert Jarvik, was first implanted in December 1982 in Dr. Barnicle, a 61-year-old retired dentist.
According to Dr. Kolff's biography, "Inventor for Life" (B & V Media Publishing, 2007), written by biographer Herman Browers, Dr. Kolff's principle was to name any model of artificial heart after a colleague with whom he was working at the time. When it came time to actually implant an artificial heart into the human body, they chose the Jarvik-7, designed by Dr. Jarvik, because of its multi-layered septum, which was key to ensuring the success of the device. However, people still credit Dr. Kolff with the honor of the artificial heart.
In 1938, Kolff, then a fledgling internist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, witnessed the long, agonizing death of a young man from temporary kidney failure. He deduced that once a way could be found to flush out the toxic waste that accumulated in patients' blood, their lives could be preserved until kidney function returned.
In his first experiments, Dr. Kolff's students injected blood into the casings of sausages, removed the air, and added urea, a waste product of renal excretion, before placing them in a saline bath and shaking them. The enteric coating was semipermeable, and small molecules of urea were able to pass through the membrane of the coating, while large molecules of blood could not.
In five minutes, all the urea dialyzed into the saline. The idea of creating an artificial kidney was born, but it wasn't long before the work went underground.
In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Rather than stay in Groningen with the **** supporters, Dr. Kolff went to a small hospital in Kampen, in the Zuider Zee (now Lake Eise), to wait for the end of the war. It was there that he built Europe's first blood bank and hid more than 800 people in the hospital to save them from *** concentration camps. Meanwhile he continued the development of artificial kidneys.
The device at the time was a model for the Rube Goldberg (simple things done in complex ways) machine. The device used 50 yards of sausage casings wrapped around a wooden drum and immersed in salt water. Patient blood is drawn from the wrist artery and added to the casing, and the drum is rotated to remove blood waste. To return the blood safely to the patient, Dr. Kolff copied the design of a Ford car engine water pump unit. Later, he refined his device with orange juice cans and washing machines.
The initial 15 patients who used the device died. Dr. Kolff made improvements to the device, including optimizing the application of blood thinners to prevent blood clotting. in 1945, a 67-year-old woman who had already been in a coma due to kidney failure while in prison after liberation was saved by applying the device for much longer than previous users had. Her first words when she awoke were "I want a divorce from my husband." . She did get divorced (she was a **** supporter, her husband was an opponent) and lived for over 7 years.
In 1947, Dr. Kolff gave an artificial kidney device to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and lobbied American doctors who were interested in artificial organs. Eventually the device was further refined and was able to be used routinely by patients whose kidneys had failed irretrievably. Tens of thousands of people now receive dialysis three times a week, often as over-the-counter treatment for kidney transplants.
In 1950, Dr. Kolff joined the Coffland Clinical Foundation in the United States. He first had to improve his English, retake his medical exams, and take U.S. citizenship as a U.S. citizen. He completed the above process in six years. Shortly thereafter, he developed the membrane oxygenator for use in bypass surgery and in 1957 placed the first artificial heart in a dog, which survived for 90 minutes.
He joined the University of Utah in 1967 to head an artificial organ institute. The institute, which consisted of 175 physicians, surgeons, engineers, chemists, and other specialists, successively completed trials of mechanical hearts in reanimated animals.
In 1981, Dr. Kolff received permission from the University of Utah and the federal government to perform human transplants of artificial hearts. Dr. Clark received the first artificial heart transplant on Dec. 2, 1982, and survived for 112 days before dying of multiple organ failure.
William John Colfer was born on February 14, 1911, in Leiden, the Netherlands, and received his M.D. in 1938 from the University of Leiden and his Ph.D. in 1946 from the University of Groningen.
Dr. Kolff is the founder of the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs and has received honorary doctorates from more than 12 universities around the world as well as more than 120 international awards including the 2002 Albert Lasker Award (for clinical medical research). Lasker Award (Clinical Medical Research). He is widely published.
Dr. Kolff married Janke C. Huidekoper in 1937; they divorced in 2000 after 63 years of marriage. In addition to his son Therus, Dr. Colfer is survived by 3 sons (Jacob, Albert, and Keith), 1 daughter (Adelie Burnett), 12 grandchildren, and 6 great-grandchildren. His former wife died in 2006.
Dr. Colfer worked on artificial organs, including eyes, ears, and limbs, before retiring in 1997 at the age of 86. He developed an artificial heart, which was later designed to be implanted in vivo and used today as an over-the-counter treatment for heart failure patients.
Dr. Kolff was always adamant that "if a man can grow a heart, he can make one." .
The invention of the artificial dialysis machine has saved the lives of countless kidney failure patients around the world and relieved the suffering of many advanced diabetics. It was invented by a brilliant Dutch doctor, Willem Kolff, a great physician-inventor who died this Wednesday at the age of 97 from old age and failing health.
Willem Kolff's idea for an artificial dialysis machine came to him after he witnessed a 22-year-old man die of kidney failure. He studied and utilized the cooling unit of an old Ford automobile and developed the first simple hemodialysis machine using metal fragments from a German plane shot down during World War II.
His first experiment was actually quite simple, using sausage casings filled with blood, emptied of air bubbles, and then added "urea," a waste product of the kidneys, and placed in a saline bath and stirred. Since the enteric coating is semi-permeable, waste products such as urea are expelled and large blood proteins are retained. In just five minutes, the urea is dialyzed out, and the principle of the osmotic machine and the prototype machine are born.
Early 1940s, Dr. Kolff began a trial in patients, the patient's blood is from the wrist arteries and enter the semi-permeable membrane enteric coated, through the rotation of the drum to promote the blood circulation in vitro, eliminating impurities. The osmotically "clean" and safe blood was then delivered back to the patient. But the initial results were unsatisfactory, with 15 patients dying. Undaunted, he repeatedly improved the dialysis machine based on the principles of automobile water pumps and devices such as washing machines, and added antithrombotic agents to prevent the formation of blood clots. The hemodialyzer was finally a success.
After successfully inventing the dialysis machine, Kolff continued to improve the medical device, making it the most popular device in the clinic today, and the most popular with doctors and patients alike. Not satisfied with his success, Colfer continued his favorite inventions and contributed significantly to the creation of the heart-lung machine and the artificial heart.
Colf was not only a great inventor, but also a very modest and kind scholar. He always referred to or named different versions of the mechanical heart based on the contributions of different people and different people's names. "We have the Donovan heart, the Green heart, the Kwan Gett heart, the Jarvik heart and so on. In fact, these improved artificial hearts could not have been created without Colfer's groundbreaking work, so Prof. Don E. Olsen, who inherited the research from his laboratory, believes that all of them should be referred to as "Colfer's hearts."
Besides his role as an inventor, Colfer always embodied his role as a physician, and the first patient his dialysis machine saved was a woman, a hated Nazi collaborator. Someone pleaded with Colfer at the time, "Let this evil patient die," but Colfer replied that no doctor has the right to decide whether his patient is good or evil. As a doctor, he must treat each patient as carefully as he needs to. "