Willem Kolff Interview (page: 9 / 9) Pioneer of Artificial Organs	Print Interview

What challenge are you going to take up next, Dr. Kolff? What is personally fascinating you right now?

Willem Kolff: I have recently gotten interested in penal reform. I spent the whole day in the state prison here. Not that I was arrested, but I saw how it was, and I listened to the prisoners. I'm very disturbed when I see legislators cut money from the prison system when they've never been in prison and don't understand what the needs are.

On one hand, they insist that more people be put in prison, but they don't expand the prison, so the prison is overpopulated. Last year in Salt Lake City, it was a cold winter, so the prison system had a bill that was $150,000 more than they had counted on. The only place they could take the money from was from the education program. If they are uneducated, 65% come back. If they're educated, then the recidivism is very much lower.

What would you like to contribute in this field?

Willem Kolff: All I can do is try to use my influence. So I write small articles in the local newspaper. Then I get responses, sometimes threats.

Another thing I think is very wrong is the attempts to make abortion illegal. I was in Lima, Peru and they said, "Dr. Kolff, would you like to meet four women who have been saved by your artificial kidney?" They were middle class women, who had already had three or four children. They decided that they could not afford a fifth, they had illegal abortions and they were infected. They would have died if they had not been dialyzed, but they're the lucky ones.

I will never forget a young girl who was brought to my hospital in the Netherlands in the middle of the night. She had been injected with copper sulfate by somebody trying to do an illegal abortion. Every red blood cell was broken by the cooper sulfate. I can still hear her older sister calling through the halls, "Oh, Marika! Oh, Marika!" when she died. There was not a thing I could do about it. Now we're going back to that, and I can't understand why. We should resist it.

What about you, Dr. DeVries? What do you think the next great medical frontier is?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. William DeVries: We're going to have replaceable artificial hearts they are going to put in patients. You know, a lot of people die, you know. It's estimated that probably about a thousand people a day die of heart disease in the United States. And, many of these could have machines put in their chests and keep them alive. So, I think we are, over the next several years, going to develop an artificial heart that is fully contained, and will be replacing that. There's very clear artificial kidneys that are wearable. We have artificial intestines. Almost every single joint in your body can be replaced. And I think that, as these organs die or become useless, other artificial organs are going to be used, and be useful in the future.

I think the next real push is getting into the genes. That's going to be incredible, as we start doing gene splicing and curing diseases by genetic alteration. I think that's where the next fascinating frontier of medicine will be.

Dr. Kolff, are there any personal inventive challenges that you're taking on right now?

Willem Kolff: Yes. I can show you an invention that's four days old. In the last few years, some surgeons have been wrapping a large muscle, the latissimus dorsi, around a failing heart. This skeletal muscle, when stimulated electrically, can be retrained and can begin to pulse and take over part of the heart function.

The problem, however, is that you must have a very sick patient, or you wouldn't do it. And you need six weeks before this muscle is trained. About a week ago we conceived the idea that we would combine it with an air pump. I called Dr. Stevenson in Detroit, who is a world expert on this. I said, "I'll make one for you. Give me ten days and you'll have one." He said, "I'll put it in an animal and I'll test it for you." These are the exciting things for the inventor.

So, you've just invented that?

Willem Kolff: Yeah. So it's not necessarily true that when you're older you stop being inventive. Let me show you for a moment how these clam shell hearts work. This is the right ventricle and this is the left. I could put them right next to the heart here. Now I pump, and I hope that my heart will recover in between. If it doesn't, you take the heart out, but you leave these pumps in. Now you can wait until a donor comes along, put a donor heart in, and wait until you're certain that the donor heart works. If it works, you take the ventricles out. If it doesn't work, you leave them in. These pumps are sufficient to carry the entire circulation.

The previous artificial hearts were all very rigid and hard. If you were to take the Jarvik heart and hit it on the table you could damage the table. So I make hearts that are softer, to make it easy for surgeons to implant them. You can take this one apart, and then the surgeons can implant this very easily. Now, what I have just told you has never been done. It should have been done, and it can be done, but it has not been done yet.

You've described invention as the place where there was the excitement, the breakthroughs and the fun.

Willem Kolff: I still have a wonderful life. To suddenly see that you can do something that was not done before! Also, when a new thought is born, in a meeting with young students and co-workers, that is fun.

I see you smile when you talk about your work being fun. What about the frustrations?

Willem Kolff: If you can't stand the heat, you shouldn't be in the kitchen. I would be lying if I said I haven't had some sleepless nights. I recall every mistake I've made, particularly when a patient was involved.

I studied pathological anatomy for two years when I was a student. That cut a lot of fun out of my student times. I had to work extra hard, I didn't lose any time. When I came to Kampen, the first thing I did was set up an autopsy room. If one of my patients died, I did the autopsy. That was usually very satisfying, because it showed me that although the patient was dead, I had been right. I remember, for example, one young man who died from a bleeding ulcer. I was very unhappy about it, and did an autopsy. It proved that it was not a regular ulcer, it was a carcinoma of the stomach. Then you don't have any guilt feelings anymore, because there's nothing that you could have done about it.

When you're away from your work, do you still think about it all the time?

Willem Kolff: I wouldn't say all the time, but a great deal of the time, yes. It's one of the complaints -- and probably a very legitimate complaint -- of my wife. If I have a problem, I get involved with all my personality. Inventions are rarely made when you're sitting at your desk, or when you're writing. Inventions come at four o'clock in the morning. My wife has said, "I can't sleep, the bed is full of electricity." Poor thing. She's been very supportive, but it must be difficult. In Holland I would take my bicycle and bicycle through the meadows. That's also a time when inventions come.

Another time inventions may come is when you discuss it with others. This is why I have my morning conference with not more than eight people, very young people, and it is a delight. By the way, in Holland, if you study medicine, the government will pay you. The Dutch students that I have here are paid by the Dutch government, even while they're here. I wish it was that way in this country.

Dr. Kolff, can you talk about having a balance in your personal life versus your work life? How do you work that out?

Willem Kolff: I may be an inventor, but in the first place I'm a doctor. So for many years I was available day and night. It might be Christmas Day when I was called away. My wife was very good in never opposing me when I was called for a patient who was ill. But, she insisted that I spend at least Saturday afternoon and Sunday with the family. And that I did, as long as we had small children. We have five children.

Then of course we had a lot of visitors. I've never been paid very much, so I didn't have the money to take them to a restaurant. The only thing I could do was call my wife and say, "I have a Spaniard here, may I bring him for dinner?" That was at five o'clock, and at six o'clock I brought the guy for dinner. Then he had to have dinner with the whole family, and there was one rule: medicine could not be discussed.

Our oldest son is now a heart surgeon. When he was in school, he looked over our guest book before he made a tour around the world. He stayed in a hotel only once. Otherwise he stayed with people who'd had dinner with the family.

Is it difficult to maintain a balanced life when you're so intent on what you're doing?

Willem Kolff: It became more difficult when the children left the house. Fortunately my wife is the curator of malacology in the Museum of Natural History here. Malacology is the knowledge of sea shells. She has the best and largest scientific collection between the West Coast and Chicago. For years I accepted invitations for talks in other countries only when it was near the seashore, so we could collect sea shells.

We're both bird watchers. We both like nature. We did the sculptures of the animals from roots and branches together. So we've done many great things together, and we have many common interests. I am sure it's been hard on my wife when I wrote too many grant proposals. That was very difficult for her.

Do you have any more questions?

Do you have any more answers?

Willem Kolff: Some things I've said are not very encouraging. I can't help that. But it does not discourage me. I would say to younger people, even as of this moment, when the prospects are bleak, the need is still there. And if you're young, maybe by the time that you're ready to do this kind of work, the sky will be bluer than it is now.

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