Dr. Willem Johan Kolff, "the father of artificial organs," who invented the kidney dialysis machine and helped design the first artificial heart to be used in a human, died in February 2009 in the U.S.A of age-related causes. He was 97. Dr. Kolff was one of a team of surgeons who made headlines worldwide when they implanted an artificial heart, the Jarvik-7, into Seattle dentist Barney Clark at University Hospital in 1982. Clark lived for four months, then died with the heart still functioning.

The scope of Dr. Kolff's medical accomplishments included building the world's first kidney dialysis machine. As a young doctor in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during World War II, Dr. Kolff began experimenting with sausage casings made of cellophane, a form of plastic made from wood or cotton. He found that when the casings were filled with blood and agitated in a solution of salt water, the urea and excess water diffused out while essential blood components were trapped inside the tube. Heparin, moreover, had become commercially available by then. He wrapped the tubing around a drum and using parts from an automobile water pump and some empty orange juice cans, he built a mechanism to turn the drum, thus developing the rotating drum kidney in 1941. This led to the 1955 twin-coil kidney, providing the possibility of the first dialysis for kidney patients worldwide. He began work on heart-lung machines in 1948, and the first membrane oxygenators were used successfully in patients in 1955. Dr. Kolff's first work on the artificial heart began in 1957 at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. In 1967, he became head of the division of artificial organs at the University of Utah and director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering.

In September 2002, Dr. Kolff received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research — considered to be the highest honour in American medicine — for his development of kidney dialysis. The nominating committee noted the invention "changed kidney failure from a fatal to a treatable disease, prolonging the useful lives of millions of patients."