It’s in the Blood

Kidney Research at UW — 1959–1964

I literally woke up in the middle of the night with the idea of how to save these people.

Belding Scribner

Dr. Scribner was well known at the University of Washington as a committed researcher, excellent teacher and thoughtful mentor. (Scribner Collection, University Archives, Special Collections, UW Libraries)

In 1960, diagnosis of kidney failure was a death sentence. UW nephrologist Belding Scribner and his colleagues developed transformative innovations that allowed millions to live on long-term dialysis. As a result: acute kidney disease flipped from being 90% fatal to 90% survivable.

Kidneys clean the blood as it circulates. When they fail, the blood must cleansed by machine dialysis or the patient will die. Long ago, patients could only endure a few treatments before their arteries became too damaged to continue.

After losing one of his patients because of this limitation in 1959, Scribner visualized the shunt: a u-shaped tube that joins an artery to a vein, which would be permanently implanted. Looking for a non-reactive material that wouldn’t cause clotting or infection, Scribner happened on Teflon by chance and turned to UW bioengineer Wayne Quinton. Together, they developed the Scribner shunt. When Scribner reported the breakthrough at a national conference, the audience of researchers rose to their feet, cheering.

A Quinton Scribner-shunt, schematically and in reality

Close-up of the first kidney dialysis machine at UW, from about 1960. (Scribner Collection, University Archives, Special Collections, UW Libraries)

The Seattle Artificial Kidney Center opened in 1962, the world’s first outpatient dialysis center, based on Scribner’s work. But the treatment was high-tech and expensive. The result was that doctors had to ration access, effectively deciding who lived and who died. Disturbed by this, Scribner urged his UW colleague Albert Babb to develop more efficient, less expensive dialysis machines and techniques. Today, more than 400,000 Americans receive long-term dialysis each year, a gift of life that UW innovators helped make possible.