Dutchman who turned Nazi debris into a dialysis machine

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Dutchman who turned Nazi debris into a dialysis machine

By Phil Davison

Published: February 20 2009 19:35 | Last updated: February 20 2009 19:35

It was 1941. Willem Kolff, a young doctor, had watched in horror as the Nazis invaded his native Netherlands yet he refused to let the occupation stop his pioneering work on a new medical invention.

In a cramped hospital room he was building the world’s first kidney dialysis machine and he was doing it with the most extraordinary collection of materials foraged from a war-torn countryside. There were parts from a downed Luftwaffe fighter aircraft and from the radiator of an abandoned Ford car. There were orange juice tins, an enamel bathtub, a wooden drum and thin, artificial sausage skins.

The strange prototype would one day save the lives of millions. Kolff himself, an inventive genius who has died at the age of 97, would go on to become the driving force behind the first artificial heart as well as a man-made eye, an artificial ear and one of the first sophisticated prosthetic arms. He never patented any of his inventions because he believed they should benefit all mankind, not one individual.

His early dialysis machines failed and 16 patients died. The 17th, just weeks after the end of the second world war in 1945, was 67-year-old Sophia Schafstadt, a Nazi collaborator.

“Most people wanted to wring her neck,” said Kolff later. He himself had supported the Dutch resistance. He had helped save 800 of his countrymen from Nazi labour camps by hiding them – he concealed one 10-year-old Jewish boy in his own home – or by helping them fake the symptoms of disease. Yet he still used his machine to bring Schafstadt, the dying Nazi sympathiser, out of a coma and she lived for another seven years.

“The moral is that we have to treat patients when they need help even if we don’t like them,” he said.

After the war, “Pim” Kolff emigrated to the US, working first in Cleveland, Ohio, and then as director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. From the start he pursued his dream of creating an artificial heart. In 1982 at Utah he succeeded, leading the team that implanted an artificial heart in retired dentist Barney Clark. Such was Kolff’s modesty that he allowed the heart to be named the Jarvik-7 after Robert Jarvik, one of the students who had helped him perfect it.

The breakthrough was hugely controversial at the time – even many doctors felt it was unethical. Criticism grew when Clark died after 112 days. Yet the artificial heart became a significant bridge to the transplantation of human hearts.

At Utah, Kolff also pioneered, along with William Dobelle, an artificial eye, stimulating points of the brain to give some light to blind people; and an artificial ear, stimulating the acoustic nerve. Neither has yet proved commercially viable.

Yet after creating one of the first prosthetic arms, Kolff said: “Our artificial arm is so good that it can peel an orange, so strong it can crack a nut. It can move very fast, but when it comes close to your mouth it goes slowly suddenly, because otherwise you would knock your teeth out.”

Willem Johan Kolff was born in Leiden in 1911, the eldest of five children of a doctor who ran a tuberculosis sanatorium. A child who loved making things – he studied carpentry on Saturday afternoons – the young Pim was moved by seeing his father weep over patients he could not help and opted to go into medicine.

He studied at the university of Leiden, married a fellow student, Janke Huidekoper, in 1937 and, despite learning difficulties that would later be diagnosed as dyslexia, graduated in 1938.

The day the Nazi bombers invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Kolff and his wife were in The Hague for the funeral of her grandfather. He left the funeral and volunteered at the city’s main hospital, where he was given a car and a Dutch military driver. For four days he scoured the city for blood donors and equipment for what would become Europe’s first blood bank.

He continued his medical studies working as a resident at the university of Groningen but quit in 1941 when his mentor, a Jewish professor called Leo Polak Daniels, committed suicide and was replaced by a Nazi.

Kolff found a job as a hospital intern in Kampen. There, haunted by the death of a 22-year-old man from kidney failure, he set about “tinkering” with a device that might do the work of a human kidney. His aim: to filter urea and other toxins from the blood and to keep the blood from clotting while it was outside the body.

Success came in 1945 with Schafstadt. Kolff recalled later that her first words as she came out of the coma were: “I’m going to divorce my husband.” Her husband had opposed the Nazis – and she did divorce him.

Kolff completed a PhD at Groningen the following year and emigrated to Cleveland in 1950. Although he formally retired in 1986, he continued working at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering until 1997. In later life he was often fiercely critical of the US Food and Drug Administration, saying costly regulations were inhibiting new developments.

Kolff was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1985. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize several times, latterly in 2003 for the physiology or medicine award. In 2002, he received the prestigious Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research for inventing the artificial kidney.

Kolff was still “tinkering” until shortly before his death. It was because she finally lost patience with his “constant tinkering”, that he and his wife of 63 years divorced in 2000, when he was 89. She died in 2005.

Kolff is survived by four sons and a daughter.

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