Word: inventor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...idea came to me out of simple frustration," says Dr. Eli A. Friedman, inventor of the suitcase kidney. Fried man, director of the renal diseases section at New York's Downstate Medical Center, had planned to take 25 kidney patients on a European holiday in 1974, dialyzing them at stopovers en route. But at the last minute, medical authorities in Copenhagen concluded that they did not have enough dialysis machines to handle so many additional patients. Forced to cancel the trip, Friedman resolved to build a dialysis machine that kidney patients could carry on their travels and operate...
Still, the suitcase kidney is only an interim solution. Doctors hope ultimately for a machine so small and efficient that it would be inconspicuous when worn. The University of Utah's Dr. Willem Kolff, inventor of the original dialysis machine, reports progress toward that goal. He and his collaborators have developed an 8-lb. machine dubbed WAK (for wearable artificial kidney) that lets a patient walk around periodically during dialysis while it is hung from a shoulder band or strapped to the chest...
...acronym loosely coined by Inventor Jack Cover from Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle...
...British have come up with a better solution. The big packaging firm of Coloroll, Ltd., is producing plastic bags that will decompose naturally in five years. The secret: addition of clean, dry starch to plastic polymers. "By putting in the starch," explains Inventor Gerald J.C. Griffin, a teacher of plastics technology at Brunei University, "we are adding carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The bags will act as a carbon source for soil bacteria, breaking down into humus and carbon dioxide." Griffin's process, which can be used for most plastic products, has a powerful appeal beyond reducing long-lived litter...
...Rotel's Bavarian inventor, Georg Höltl, points out that his rigs enable vacationers to get to places that do not have hotels or even campsites. His Sahara trip from Tunisia to Nigeria, billed as "the most daring tourist program ever offered," is almost impossible to duplicate by private car. Conventional accommodations are expensive or nonexistent at most stopovers on Höltl's 7,000-mile Indian expedition or his 8,000-mile Peru-to-Patagonia haul. "We go to the interior, where the ordinary people live," says Jan Buchta, a veteran Rotel guide, who likes...