Persistence … and Prayer: From the Artificial Kidney to the AutoAnalyzer

I am a relic of the last century, born in 1918, the last year of the first World War. At that time, there was no radio, no television, no commercial air travel. There was no welfare, no social security, no Medicare, and only the rich paid income taxes. Influenza, strep throat, pneumonia, tuberculosis, polio, and high blood pressure were deadly diseases.I was 11 when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. Unemployment reached 25%. The most precious thing a person could have was a job. In 1940, I entered graduate school studying biochemistry at what is now Case Western Reserve University. Victor Myers was head of the department. He was near the end of his career and was prone to talk about his old friends Otto Folin and Stanley Benedict and others and their struggle to learn how to analyze blood. They were the first clinical chemists. They had no pH meter, no spectrophotometer. Optical densities were estimated by visual comparison of standard and unknown. They had to calibrate their own pipettes. It could not have been easy.When I entered the department, most everyone used DuBosc visual colorimeters. We had one Evelyn photoelectric colorimeter with glass filters and one newly invented Beckman pH meter. There was no good way to determine the quantitative amino acid composition of proteins. No one understood what the purine and pyrimidine bases and nucleic acids were good for. The Journal of Biochemistry published one modest volume a year.I do not think any of us understood that we were caught up in a wave of scientific and technological progress that would grow and gather speed at an exponential rate. I am glad to have lived during this period and to have been a very, very small part of it all.By …