I’ve been mortally opposed to the so-called life-and-death committees that were instituted. When there were many more patients that needed to be dialyzed, and not enough artificial kidneys available, you had the institution of the life-and-death committees. ... Depending on the answer to these questions, he could be dialyzed. Otherwise, he could go to hell. I’ve been mortally opposed to that. When I set up a dialysis center here with a grant from some government agency, I was forced to put in a life-and-death committee, but it never met.
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Willem Kolff
Physician and inventor; builder of the first practical artificial kidney
Netherlands · 1911–2009
Science and medicine
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Dutch physician who built the first practical dialysis machine in occupied Kampen during the Second World War, then moved to the United States, where he worked on the heart-lung machine and the artificial heart at the Cleveland Clinic and the University of Utah.
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