Pioneer Editorials

On January 20, 2024, we mourned the passing of Professor Zbylut Twardowski, a distinguished Polish-American nephrologist renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to renal replacement therapy. His achievements, detailed in numerous co-authored studies, continue to...

The quest to replace the natural heart with an artificial one as a permanent system is among the remaining holy grails in medicine and surgery. Beginning in1969, when the first total artificial heart (TAH) was implanted into a human, to the present, several types have been developed—the AbioCor was among them…

    Stephen R. Topaz After graduating from Purdue University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Mr.Topaz joined Dr. Willem Kolff's lab at the Cleveland Clinic. Here, he helped design, build, and operate artificial hearts, developed the Intra-Aortic Balloon Pump,...

John-Peder Escobar Kvitting1,2 | Bansi Koul3 | Odd R. Geiran1,2 1Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Oslo University Hospital, Rikshospitalet, Oslo, Norway 2Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway 3Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Skåne...

Jason J. Han Lyle D. Joyce, MD, PhD is an adult cardiac surgeon who helped pioneer the artificial heart technology throughout his career. In 1982, he and Dr. William DeVries implanted Jarvik- 7 total artificial heart (TAH) in a patient named Barney Clark, which was...

Jason J. Han   Muhammad M. Mohiuddin MBBS is currently a Professor of Surgery and the Director of the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Prior to joining the faculty there, he was the chief of the transplantation...

Nicholas D. Lorusso1 | Uma R. Mohan2 | Joshua Jacobs2,3 1 Department of Biological Sciences,Columbia University, New York, USA 2 Department of BiomedicalEngineering, Columbia University, NewYork, USA 3 Department of Neurological Surgery,Columbia University, New York,...

AbstractAs a native Houstonian, the notoriety surrounding Dr. Denton A Cooley’s implantation of the total artificial heart on Good Friday, April 4, 1969, was inescapable. At the time, Drs. Cooley and Michael E. DeBakey were the two most famous surgeons in Houston and...

Abstract In the course of over four decades, I have worked with an R&D team on 12 major R&D projects, all with the goal of making hemodialysis simple, safe, effective, and suitable for use in the home. Our team has worked within a University and in private...

   Originally published in Volume 45 Issue 11 of Artificial Organs, 30 May 2021 Author Tom Clancy popularized the term magnetohydrodynamics in his 1984 techno-thriller novel, The Hunt for Red October.1-3 The Red October is a Soviet Typhoon Class stealth nuclear...

Originally published in Volume 44 Issue 6 of Artificial Organs, 29 April 2020 1 OVERVIEW The first heart transplantation (HTx) in Japan was carried out in Sapporo by Dr. J. Wada 8 months after Dr. C. Barnard performed the world’s first case in Cape Town, South Africa...

Originally published in Volume 43 Issue 10 of Artificial Organs, 27 June 2019 The invention of the heart-lung machine by Dr. John H. Gibbon Jr., through its long development cycle at Jefferson Medical College (now Thomas Jefferson University) from its conception in...

Originally published in Volume 43 Issue 8 of Artificial Organs, 07 August 2019 In 1943, Willem Kolff (1911-2009) initiated hemodialysis in patients in The Netherlands and is considered a pioneer of dialysis treatment. However, Nils Alwall (1904-1986) of Lund, Sweden,...

Originally published in Volume 43 Issue 6 of Artificial Organs, 23 April 2019 I graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1966. During my student years, I had little academic exposure to the developing field of artificial organs. I was not even sure what...

Originally published in Volume 43 Issue 3 of Artificial Organs, 21 February 2019 Fourteen patients, aged 19-56 years, (with chronic renal failure caused by isolated renal diseases) were treated with hemodialysis. The frequency and duration of dialyses were adjusted to...

Originally published in Volume 43 Issue 2 of Artificial Organs, 28 January 2019 The feasibility of kidney transplantation had its foundation in advances in the dialysis management of patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). Dr. Willem Kolff invented the first...

Originally published in Volume 42 Issue 8 of Artificial Organs, 04 September 2018 On May the 6th, 1953 John H. Gibbon Jr., MD (Dr. Gibbon) became the first surgeon to perform an open cardiotomy during bypass under direct vision in a human, by repairing an interatrial...

Originally published in Volume 42 Issue 5 of Artificial Organs, 16 May 2018 Could a mechanical heart be built? One that would be good enough to use clinically? How fanciful was this idea, and, if taken on, how best to go about it? In the late 1950s and 1960s, three...

Originally published in Volume 42 Issue 2 of Artificial Organs, 13 February 2018 It was July 1956 and I was ready to start a research fellowship at Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) in Cleveland, OH under Dr. Willem Kolff (Fig. 1). As a Japanese exchange fellow, I was...

Originally published in Volume 40 Issue 3 of Artificial Organs, 04 March 2016 Since the development of silicone peritoneal catheter and plastic bag systems, peritoneal dialysis (PD) has gained acceptance as a mode of long-term renal replacement therapy (RRT) over the...

Originally published in Volume 39 Issue 12 of Artificial Organs, 02 December 2015 I would like to thank Drs. Todd Ing and Paul Malchesky for inviting me to contribute a second editorial to the Artificial Organs “Pioneer” Series. My first contribution was based on my...

Originally published in Volume 39 Issue 6 of Artificial Organs, 03 June 2015 In June 1967, at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz and his surgical team successfully used a new device—the intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP)—to treat a patient...

Originally published in Volume 39 Issue 2 of Artificial Organs, 12 February 2015 The most dramatic episode in my entire nephrology career of nearly four decades occurred at Cook County Hospital of Chicago (now John Stroger Hospital) between April and September 1985...

Originally published in Volume 38 Issue 12 of Artificial Organs, 19 December 2014 These reminiscences are dedicated to the real pioneers in peritoneal dialysis (PD) who set the foundations for our subsequent contributions. The list of contributors is vast, but three...

Originally published in Volume 38 Issue 3 of Artificial Organs, 10 March 2014 This memorandum is based on more than a quarter century of research and development which I have devoted to this field in collaboration with many gifted and dedicated colleagues. To begin...

Originally published in Volume 37 Issue 12 of Artificial Organs, 11 December 2013 In 1983 I started my research on biomedical engineering together with Oxford professor Hans Motz and the Austrian cochlear implant pioneers Ingeborg and Erwin Hochmair by simulating...

Originally published in Volume 37 Issue 10 of Artificial Organs, 20 October 2013 Isolated ultrafiltration (IUF) and its kin have been useful tools in the control of overhydration in the hands of physicians for a number of decades. A plethora of investigators has...

Originally published in Volume 37 Issue 7 of Artificial Organs, 08 July 2013 My encounter with research concerning artificial hearts in the United States led to my interest in the development of artificial hearts. Though I planned to initiate research on artificial...

Originally published in Volume 37 Issue 4 of Artificial Organs, 05 April 2013 The first hemodialysis was done by Pim Kolff on March 15, 1943 in the hospital in Kampen, Holland, and I believe the first in the USA was done at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston,...

Originally published in Volume 37 Issue 3 of Artificial Organs, 05 March 2013 This project was initiated by close cooperation between the Department of Cardiac Surgery and the Institute of Pathophysiology, Faculty of Medicine, Purkinje University (Masaryk University...