A medical doctor who grew up in the Netherlands, one of Kolff’s first patients was dying of kidney failure. Kolff set out to see if he could build an artificial kidney.
He kept his focus wide, however: in 1940, he organized the first blood bank in Europe. By then, Germany was occupying the Netherlands, and Kolff was active in the resistance against the Nazis: he hid 800 people at his hospital to prevent them from being sent to labor camps. Yet he still had time to work on his artificial kidney, succeeding in 1943; in 1945 he saved his first life with the machine.
Since then, his kidney dialysis methods have saved millions of lives. In 1950 he moved to the United States, and worked on heart-lung machines. “If a man can grow a heart,” he liked to say, “he can build one.” He eventually did: helping to develop the “Jarvik” artificial heart that was implanted in Barney Clark in 1982. (Clark survived four months; when he died, the heart kept pumping.) The “membrane oxygenator” he invented, which adds oxygen to blood as it flows through an artificial heart, is still used in heart-lung machines today. Kolff worked on other artificial organs, including eyes and ears, until he retired in 1997. He died February 11, 3 days before his 98th birthday.