Willem Kolff

Willem Kolff was born in Leiden in 1911, the son of a doctor who ran a tuberculosis sanatorium. As a junior physician at Groningen in 1938 he was given the care of a young man dying of kidney failure and could do nothing but watch. He began to read about how blood might be cleaned outside the body. In 1940 he also set up the first blood bank in Europe.

After the German invasion he moved to a small hospital in Kampen, partly to get away from a Nazi appointee at Groningen. There, with the help of a local enamel factory, he built a machine from sausage casings wound round a wooden drum, orange juice tins, and a water pump from a Ford car. The patient\'s blood ran through the casing while the drum turned in a bath of salt solution, and waste products passed out through the skin. He also hid people from the occupiers and treated members of the resistance.

He treated his first patient in 1943. She died, as did the next fourteen. In September 1945 a 67-year-old woman in a coma from kidney failure woke up after eleven hours on the machine and lived another seven years. Kolff gave copies of the machine away to hospitals in London, New York and Montreal.

He moved to the United States in 1950 and spent the rest of his life on artificial organs, leading the Utah team whose artificial heart was implanted in 1982. He died in 2009 aged 97.