I was surprised that no one really reported about this man’s death.  He died last year- 2 days before Thanksgiving.  But, I didn’t hear about it at all until last month.

Richard Drake, a physician, was one of the many folks who was willing to spend time with me when I was trying to develop an artificial kidney.

Dr. Drake became involved in machinery (a few years after my first interests) when he happened to meet a tinkerer (what do you call someone who invents things, has no degree, and works for a sawmill making things work????) back some 55 years ago.  Charlie Willock developed a machine to deliver dialysate (the salt water solution that serves as a “sink” for the impurities in our blood) in his basement.

(I met Willock before I met Drake.  Back when I had commandeered the family basement for my inventions.   And, my chemistry set.

One of the interesting [at least to me] facts about why folks might have been willing to talk to a young kid about dialysis reached my consciousness when I was discussing Dick Drake with a friend recently.  Back when I was a kid, folks didn’t make long distance phone calls and there was no internet.  We wrote letters to one another.  And, I had been trained in calligraphy by my great-grandfather.  My handwriting was [is?] pretty impressive.  So, the recipients of my letters had no idea I might have been 8,9,10, or even 12.  When I met Charlie Willock, he thought my grandfather was me- until my grandfather pointed to me and said:  “Nope.  This is Roy.”)

Back then, folks pretty much used the Kiil flat plate device (see the schematic above), with a central tank where dialysate was mixed and dispensed to various Kiil devices in a room nearby.  That meant that everyone was being treated with the same solution- even though some needed potassium amplification, others needed a means to remove more water from the body, etc.  But, it worked, somewhat, and the therapy was twelve hours, thrice a week.

Charlie and Richard recognized that using a dispensary for a single Kill unit would let one provide individualized treatment.  A much better proposition when considering the benefits to each patient.  And, it was the early 1960’s that dialysis was becoming an established method to keep kidney failure patients alive- even though many hospitals (there were no free-standing clinics then) lacked the equipment needed to provide the therapy.  (It presumably was this need that sparked my interest in dialysis.)

So, beginning in 1964, that’s just what they did.  The Drake-Willock unit developed what became the standard ratio (until 1982 when my next development changed the landscape) for dialysate concentrates.  A firm would make a concentrate  of the components needed (in a 1 gallon container)  that would be diluted (hopefully with purified water) to yield some 130 liters of dialysate, delivered to the Kiil unit  at the rate of 500 ml of solution a minute.

Over the next 10 years, Drake Willock overtook Milton Roy (the first  dialysate dispensary for Kiil dialyzers) and Travenol Labs (the company is now called Baxter, which used a competing dialyzer invented by Pim [Dr. Willem] Kolff, that looked more like a washing machine when in use).  The Drake-Willock unit became the ‘go to’ device in the USA, Canada, Australia, and Europe.

(The Milton Roy machine needed 220 V, used heat sterilization and was very expensive.  The DW device used bleach for disinfection, mounted the Kiil on top of the dispensing unit, used 120 V, and was on wheels so it could be moved from patient to patient.)

Charlie was the inventor, but Dr. Drake pushed Charlie to make a more ‘clinical’ device, one that would serve patients well by being easy and logical to operate.

Dr. Drake was originally from the DC area, but his family migrated to Oregon when he was 12. He received his medical training at the Oregon Health Services University and stayed around Portland, where he co-founded the Northwest Renal Clinic (Good Samaritan Hospital).

By 1976, Becton Dickinson took over Drake Willock, where they coupled that device with the mini-flat plate kidney.  Unfortunately, BD (and it’s BD Electrodyne division) lost interest in dialysis after a few years and dropped the entire line, selling it to CD Medical (It might have been called Cordis Dow back then), which had pioneered a third type of dialyzer (one of the most common nowadays), the hollow fiber unit.

[CD was fully acquired by Dow, and was eventually to became part of National Medical Care, now known as Fresenius, one of the largest medical device firms in the world, with an annual turnover in excess of 30 billion Euros.)

From the basement to around the world.