Bill Peckham
Joined: 06 Jan 2003
Posts: 65
Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2003 5:15 am Post subject: Dr. Belding Scribner 1921 - 2003
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We've lost Dr. Scribner; if only all Nephrologist had followed his lead. Here is a link to the whole story:<
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>seattlepi.nwsource.com/lo...ner21.html<
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>Here a couple quotes from the article:<
>...<
>"Dr. Scribner had invented the famous "Scribner shunt" that helped transform kidney dialysis into a long-term, life-saving treatment for kidney failure. For this, he and Dr. Willem Kolff at the University of Utah -- who developed another critical component for the dialysis machine -- won last year's Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research. The Lasker Award is considered second only to the Nobel Prize for prestige in medical achievement."<
>...<
>"So rather than run out and patent his invention and start a company, Dr. Scribner instead started a non-profit kidney dialysis center in Seattle. It was called the Seattle Artificial Kidney Center and he launched it in 1962 with assistance from Dr. James Haviland and others. The idea was to demonstrate the method worked, train doctors and make it a non-proprietary treatment available to all in need worldwide"<
>...<
>"Dr. Scribner could have made millions but he gave away his invention for free. But that hasn't stopped others from making a profit on his invention"<
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plugger
Joined: 11 Jan 2003
Posts: 258
Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2003 7:43 am Post subject: A painful loss
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The definition of a "Great Man"
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In Memory
Joined: 23 Jun 2003
Posts: 2
Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2003 7:52 am Post subject: of a Dialysis Pioneer
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What a wonderful human being. What a legacy to mankind.<
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NY Times
Joined: 24 Jun 2003
Posts: 1
Posted: Tue Jun 24, 2003 6:59 am Post subject: Scribner Obit
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Dr. Belding H. Scribner, Medical Pioneer, Dies at 82<
>By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN<
>June 22, 2003 NY Times<
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>Dr. Belding H. Scribner, who invented a device that allowed millions of people to live on long-term kidney dialysis and pioneered the development of bioethics committees, died on Thursday in Seattle. He was 82 and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington.<
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>A kayaker found Dr. Scribner's body floating near the doctor's houseboat in Portage Bay, where he was eating lunch when his wife, Ethel, left for an appointment. On her return, she said, firefighters had just recovered his body. <
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>Dr. Scribner, who was bent from osteoporosis, used two canes to walk and had heart problems, she said. <
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>L. G. Blanchard, the chief spokesman for the University of Washington School of Medicine, said, "Only one cane was found, and the presumption is that for some reason he lost his balance and drowned." <
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>Last year, Dr. Scribner won the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research for transforming kidney failure from a fatal disease to a treatable one in 1960. The device he invented, known as the Scribner shunt, allowed the artificial kidney that had been developed by Dr. Willem J. Kolff to become the only method in which a machine can permanently replace a vital organ.<
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>Dialysis has also kept more than 100,000 Americans alive long enough to receive a kidney transplant.<
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>"The development of an artificial kidney that could substitute for the body's damaged kidneys constitutes one of the monumental life-saving advances in the history of medicine," said Dr. Joseph L. Goldstein of the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, who is chairman of the jury that selects the winners of the Lasker award.<
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>When Dr. Scribner first became interested in dialysis in 1950, some patients recovered from acute kidney failure after painful short-term dialysis treatments. But chronic dialysis was an insurmountable problem, medical leaders said ? in part because every time a patient was hooked up to a dialysis machine, arteries and veins were damaged, and soon doctors had no way to connect the machine. Even if they could, critics said, no machine could match the kidney's ability to clear the blood of body wastes and perform other functions.<
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>In the late 1950's, Dr. Scribner said, he was frustrated by the inability to deliver chronic dialysis to a patient who had temporarily recovered from kidney failure with short-term dialysis but who went on to die.<
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>Weeks later, he said, he woke up in the middle of the night with the solution: Sew U-shaped tubes, or shunts, in an artery and in a vein. For each dialysis treatment, doctors could plug additional tubes into the device and attach them to an artificial kidney, creating a circuit for blood to flow from the artery to be cleansed of toxic substances in the dialysis machine before returning to the body through the vein.<
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>But Dr. Scribner still faced a problem: how to find a material that would allow blood to flow without clotting in the shunt. He said he solved it after a chance meeting with a young surgeon, Dr. Loren Winterscheid, in a stairwell at the University of Washington. <
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>Dr. Winterscheid suggested using Teflon, which had just come on the market. Working with an engineer, Wayne Quinton, and another surgeon, David Dillard, Dr. Scribner fashioned shunts that kept his first patient, Clyde Shields, a 39-year-old machinist at Boeing, alive for 11 years and his fifth patient, Tim Albers, alive for 36 years. (Further research led to the development of a direct connection between an artery and a vein.)<
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>After Dr. Scribner reported his early results in Atlantic City, the audience of researchers stood and cheered ? a rarity at a scientific meeting.<
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>Dying patients clamored for treatment. But the few dialysis machines could treat only a limited number of such patients. Who would live? Who would die? Who would decide?<
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>Dr. Scribner resolved the problem of how to pick those kidney failure patients by working with the local medical society. It suggested creating two committees, which would work independently of the university.<
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>Doctors on one committee screened the candidates' medical condition. Those who met the medical criteria were referred to a second committee, an anonymous group of leaders from a
oad spectrum of the community. The second committee chose the patients who would receive chronic dialysis. <
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>This was among the first of what would come to be known as bioethics committees. The criticism of the committee system "was just horrendous," Dr. Scribner said in an interview last year with Dr. Eric Larson, a former medical director of the University of Washington Medical Center. "Of course it wasn't fair, but it was the best that we could do."<
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>Dr. Scribner later decried the excessive profiteering from commercial dialysis centers that opened in many areas of the country.<
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>Belding Hibbard Scribner was born in Chicago on Jan. 18, 1921. He was a sickly child, he recalled, in part from severe asthma. He also had eyesight problems, for which he went to London for special lenses. He later had two corneal transplants in each eye.<
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>He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1941 and from Stanford University Medical School in 1945, and received a master's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1951. He then moved to the University of Washington, where he served as chief of kidney diseases from 1958 to 1982.<
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>From a raft attached to his houseboat, Dr. Scribner flew model airplanes. For many years, he commuted by canoe from the houseboat to the medical school across Portage Bay on Lake Union. But after Dr. Scribner was shown paddling on television, his canoes were stolen. People gave him new canoes, but they disappeared. "Finally, I had to give up and switch to a motorboat because they just kept stealing the canoes," Dr. Scribner said.<
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>Dr. Scribner said that as he worked over the years to improve kidney therapy,
to make the artificial kidney smaller and portable, and to develop an artificial gut, he solved many technical problems by walking down the hall to consult with other professors. Often, he said, "you got the right answer."<
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>Dr. Scribner's door was always open for consultation from younger colleagues. A doctor who had just begun his training to be a specialist in internal medicine in the mid-1960's recalled how he meekly knocked on Dr. Scribner's door to ask whether dialysis might be used to remove an overdose of a toxic drug that a critically ill patient had taken. Dr. Scribner greeted him warmly, said he too did not know, and searched textbooks for the pertinent information before determining that dialysis therapy would not work for that patient.<
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>Dr. Scribner, like many other residents of Washington State, imported fine wines because few were available in the state-controlled liquor stores and there were no wine shops. In the 1960's, state officials confiscated his collection but allowed him to buy it back. Publicity about the raid is credited with helping to get legislation passed a few years later that made the sale of wine more competitive.<
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>Dr. Scribner is survived by his wife; a daughter, Elizabeth, of Seattle; and three sons, Peter of Seattle, Dr. Robert of Seattle and Thomas of Portland, Ore. He is also survived by three stepsons: Brian Lederer and Bruce Lederer, both of Washington, D.C., and Dr. William J. Lederer of Baltimore.<
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