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Willem Johan Kolff's 1941 prototype of the kidney dialysis machine, crude as it may appear, testifies to the vigor and improvisational resourcefulness of scientific ingenuity applied to a specific problem, how with limited resources a researcher/technician can nevertheless realize an ambitious premise. Although the idea of dialysis had been proposed earlier, few medical researchers before Kolff looked favorably on the idea of actually draining the blood from the body as way to cleanse it of the damaging buildup of toxic materials (principally urea and other salts) that regularly resulted in the death of kidney patients. Kolff maintained that short-term external treatment of the blood could help sustain a patient until the damaged kidneys returned to full effectiveness. Eventually, his design would allow long-term care for patients with renal failure, adding years to their lives. Add to that the fact that Kolff worked under the extreme conditions of an occupied country during wartime with its resources severely curtailed, and the experimental model of the dialysis machine becomes a monumental expression of the research imperative.

Kolff was certain that toxic blood could be filtrated through a semi-permeable membrane, agitated in a saline solution to purify it, and then returned to the body. His work establishing the wartime blood bank helped him understand how to handle blood outside the body. In initial attempts, the patient's wrist artery was slit and the blood extracted fifty milliliters at a time. The blood was fed through sterile tubing of sausage casings made of cellophane (a new substance at the time) that served as the semi-permeable membrane and then agitated in a large drum that contained a sterile solution of saltwater. In so doing, as the blood passed through, impurities would be filtered out, a process that took about five minutes. The casing's microscopic pores did not allow essential red and white blood cells to fit through. Rather, the agitation in the drum allowed the salts and urea to flow through the membrane and then harmlessly out into the solution, thus removing the impurities much as a functioning kidney would. The problem of returning the treated blood proved tricky, particularly before stronger anticoagulant drugs were readily available. Kolff designed a recovery system by jury-rigging a pump based on the design of the water pump used in Ford motor engines. He implemented his design using two orange juice cans and a pump from an old washing machine. The blood was essentially pumped back into the body gently--and the process then repeated with fifty more milliliters. The process was time-consuming and, at least initially, risky (the first sixteen patients died), but Kolff resolutely set about improvements that made the machine ultimately efficient and safe…

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