91-year-old who created dialysis is still inventing

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. -- Dr. Willem J. Kolff has already helped save millions of lives with his invention of the kidney dialysis machine more than six decades ago.

But today, at age 91, the recent winner of the prestigious Lasker Award for medical research is pushing his latest potentially life-saving invention.

This time it's a portable artificial lung.

In his one-room retirement apartment, Kolff fished experimental lung parts out of a suitcase on his bed. He had gadgets and tubing spread out on a table wedged against the foot of the bed.

Then he shrugged on his portable-lung vest to demonstrate.

"This is aimed at people in pulmonary distress -- the end stage of emphysema. They are extremely short of breath," Kolff said, panting rapidly to illustrate. "And they die."

Sausage casings

Kolff has been fascinated with artificial organs since he began his career as a young doctor in Holland in 1938.

"My responsibility was four beds. In one of these was a 22-year-old man who slowly and miserably died of kidney failure," he said.

The 28-year-old doctor immersed himself in research. When he moved on to become an internist at a hospital in Kampen, "I immediately told them I wanted to work on an artificial kidney and I needed a first-class laboratory."

His first dialysis machine used cellophane tubing -- made for sausage casing -- wrapped around a cylinder that rotated in a bath of fluid. Blood drawn from the patient circulated through the tubing. The machine hummed, the fluid rippled and toxins resulting from kidney failure passed through the cellophane into the cleansing bath.

The first patient whose life was saved, in 1945, was a 67-year-old woman who was comatose with acute kidney failure. Kolff said he leaned over as she began to regain consciousness after 11 hours of dialysis. Her first words were, "I'm going to divorce my husband."

She recovered from the kidney ailment, did divorce her husband, and lived seven more years, he said.

Just the beginning

Since that time, and working in this country, he has had a role in development of the first artificial heart, an artificial ear and an electronic artificial eye commercially available since April.

The artificial kidney, he noted, was "only the beginning of my career, and that was only the beginning of artificial organs."

But such a beginning.

Joseph L. Goldstein, chairman of the Lasker Award jury, said Kolff's invention remains unique.

"Prosthetic devices for nonessential body parts, such as teeth, limbs and even hair, have been available for centuries, but the artificial kidney is the only artificial device that can replace a vital organ on a permanent basis," Goldstein said.

Kolff, professor emeritus of the University of Utah and adjunct professor of medicine at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, is the oldest Lasker Award recipient in recent memory.

The Lasker officials also noted the difficulties of inventing an artificial kidney during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

Kolff had to connive and cut corners to get materials for his wartime work, his assistant at the time wrote. Food was rationed. Telephones were tapped. There was no penicillin. Soap was scarce. Rubber tubing was hard to get. When there was no aluminum to make a rotating drum, a local cart maker built a cylinder of beechwood slats.

"It was a very difficult time," Kolff said.