The Gazette

Michael McCollum, a Senior Engineering Manager for Allied-Signal Aerospace Co., will be the speaker at the April meeting. He will give a presentation entitled "The Sky is Falling!: Asteroids, Comets, and the Total Extinction of Life on Earth." He is very active in the aerospace industry. He is also a professional science fiction writer with eight published novels. He feels that this topic will keep your attention considering the recent movie releases. Hope to see you there!

It will soon be time to begin planning the programs for our local section of AIChE for the 1999-2000 year. As Vice-Chair of our local section, I will be responsible for forming and leading the program committee. If you would like to serve (or to continue serving) on the program committee or if you have ideas for programs or the format/location/time of programs, please contact me at 229-6559 or 239-6970 or dldenton@eastman.com prior to May 1. The time required for serving on the program committee is not overwhelming, a few committee planning meetings (May through August) plus coordination of one of the year's programs, so please consider helping our section in this way. Together, let's make this a super programming year as we launch into the new millennium!

David Denton

Nineteen attendees enjoyed a very informative tour of Siemens Energy and Automation on March 11. Most were surprised to learn that Siemens was founded in 1847 and is the fifth largest company in the world. Their diversity of products includes memory chips, power plants, fuel injectors, and MRI scanners, all of which use the corporation's expertise in electrical and electronic systems.

The south Johnson City facility employs more than 900 people and contains three business units. The largest, the Automation Products Business Unit, is the company's North American headquarters for factory automation devices and programmable logic controllers. The Electronics Manufacturing Center provides manufacturing services to original equipment manufacturers of industrial, telecommunications, medical equipment, and automotive products. Automotive Technology is the newest business unit, which produces electronic assemblies for the worldwide automotive market.

Participants in the March 11 tour enjoyed seeing circuit boards assembled in an industry that is very different from the environment of most chemical engineers. Notable differences included the relative lack of chemical hazards and wastes, size of the operation, complexity of products, and degree of automation of some processes.

Following the Siemens tour, several AIChE members and guests dined at Grady's.

We received an overwhelming (>80%) response to the recent e-mail survey of our members concerning interest in the possibility of national AIChE Courses being taught in Kingsport. Thank you for telling us your course preferences. We will pursue bringing some of the most popular courses to our area for reduced tuition. If we are successful, we will let you know about times and registration.

Here are the survey results received the first few days. The first column is the number of people indicating interest in the course. (Many of our 166 respondents chose more than one course.)

Number	%

30	9.9%	Bulk Pharmaceutical and Chemical Process Development
4	1.3%	Chemical/Petroleum Process Fundamentals for Non-Chemical Engineers
15	5.0%	Industrial Fluid Mixing
33	10.9%	Reaction Kinetics for the Practical Engineer
47	15.5%	Spreadsheet Power!
20	6.6%	Pilot-Plant and Laboratory Safety
41	13.5%	Practical Project Evaluation: Capital and Operating Cost Estimation
16	5.3%	Process Optimization Using Pinch Technology
36	11.9%	Project Management
12	4.0%	Designing Air Pollution Control Equipment
49	16.2%	I am not interested in any course

If you haven’t responded to our survey, you may do so by sending Tim Nolen a note at tnolen@eastman.com or by calling 229-8287. Detailed information about these and all continuing education courses offered by the AIChE can be found online at www.aiche.org or in the catalogue you may have received by mail.

Necessity may be the mother of invention but, when dealing with life or death situations, it helps if the father is an engineer. No better example of this can be found than in the invention of the portable dialysis machine, where necessity -- a 16-year-old Seattle girl who needed dialysis therapy within four months if she was to survive -- found such a "father" in chemical/biomedical engineer Dr. Albert "Les" Babb.

Babb, an emeritus professor of chemical and nuclear engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, had previously been part of an elite team of engineers and physicians that, in 1963, built and installed a central continuous dialysate delivery system at Seattle's University Hospital that greatly reduced treatment cost, opening this life-saving therapy to more patients suffering end-stage renal failure. But, that machine, nicknamed "the Monster," could still treat only a limited number of people.

A "Life & Death Committee," set up by the King County Medical Center, was therefore forced to make some very difficult life-and-death decisions, including one that denied treatment to Caroline Helm, the high school honors student who happened to be the daughter of a friend and business associate of Babb's.

In 1964, at the request of friend and physician colleague Dr. Belding H. Scribner, Babb took on the staggering task of designing and developing a portable, fail-safe, single patient dialysis machine within the four-month period needed to keep Caroline alive.

Babb quickly assembled a team that included William E. Wilson, a physicist and supervisor of Washington's nuclear reactor facility, Albert W. Wakefield, an electronics engineer, R. Wendelle Peoples, a physicist and electronics specialist, and Richard L. Bell, then a chemical engineering graduate student and now an emeritus professor at the University of California-Davis, as well as a group of physicians led by Scribner.

With funding from the John A. Hartford Foundation, the team set about building a machine that was engineered first and foremost for patient safety. As Babb noted in a 1995 article in the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs, Inc., Journal, "Our guiding principle dictated that, in the event of a serious malfunction, the machine would change automatically to a safe configuration in which the patient would be isolated and thus protected from the effects of the malfunction." This meant building in a Central Logic Unit to automatically activate the safety circuits, as well as incorporating a number of monitors, such as one that could detect sudden changes in the patient's blood pressure.

The team encountered a number of obstacles along the way, including the need to invent equipment when none existed to meet their needs. For instance, Babb points out, "there were no acceptable, commercially available heat exchangers" that could heat the dialysate to the needed temperature, control it within very narrow limits during dialysis and then, during the sterilization cycle, heat water in the range of 85 to 90 degrees C. In this case and others, the engineers had to fabricate their own parts.

Despite all the obstacles, Babb and his colleagues had Helm on her own dialysis machine, dubbed the Mini-I, by July of 1964, within the crucial four-month period. By November of that year, about 40 home hemodialyses had been performed without any significant incidents.

Five years later, after contracting the prototype design out to the Milton Roy Company of St. Petersburg, Florida, for commercial development, the portable dialysis machine was the predominant method of treatment for renal failure, now serving a U.S. patient population of 270,000 at an annual cost of about $5.5 billion. "What we did not foresee (as we worked on the Mini-I) was that the stand-alone, single-patient proportioning machine would become the system of choice for dialysis in centers around the world," Babb observed. "These single-patient machines, and those that followed, not only improved operational safety, but also freed the nursing staff from minute-to-minute monitoring of both the patients and the machines."

Named one of the "Ten Wonders of Biomedical Engineering" by the Biomedical Engineering Society in 1990, this achievement garnered Babb a number of awards, including the 1982 National Kidney Foundation Dialysis Pioneering Award; the 1992 Clyde Shields Distinguished Service Award of the Northwest Kidney Foundation; and a 1993 Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Illinois; as well as election to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine; Fellow status in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the American Institute of Chemists, and American Nuclear Society; senior membership in the Biomedical Engineering Society; and, membership in the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Late last year, Dialysis and Transplantation magazine named a 1977 article co-authored by Babb entitled, "The Dialysis Index: A Practical Guide to Dialysis Treatment" as one of only three "landmark articles" published during its 25 years as a leading journal in the field of renal medicine. The article, which has been reprinted in the October 1996 issue of Dialysis and Transplantation, was cited as "one of the earliest contributions to the medical literature, which explained how to prescribe an adequate dialysis treatment."

While his work on the dialysis machine could have been enough achievement for one lifetime, it is actually just one in a series of accomplishments for Babb, a native of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and the son of a pharmacist who operated a drugstore at Kitsilano Beach on English Bay.

After completing his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at the University of British Columbia in 1948, he had decided to pursue a medical degree at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, until his chemistry professor, an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, encouraged Babb to pursue an engineering degree, and helped arrange a scholarship to his alma mater. He completed his master's and doctoral degrees in chemical engineering at UIUC in 1949 and 1951, respectively.

Babb's first assignment after graduation was in the research laboratories of Rayonier, Inc., in Shelton, Washington. Shortly afterwards, in 1952, he was invited to join the faculty of the University of Washington as an assistant professor. As he advanced through the ranks of the chemical engineering department, becoming a full professor in 1960, he also spearheaded the formation of the school's Nuclear Reactor Laboratories and served as founding chair of the Nuclear Engineering Department from 1965 to 1981. Throughout the 1960s, Babb was at the forefront of nationwide development of nuclear engineering education, and research on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, including the use of radioactive isotopes in medicine.

In the life science area, Babb has served as a biomedical engineering consultant to Trimedyne, Inc., for which he constructed three chemotherapeutic controllers for the experimental treatment of sickle cell anemia, and to Automedix Sciences, Inc., for which he worked on the development of an extracorporeal chemotherapeutic device for treating malignant brain tumors.

At various times throughout his career, Babb has also done consulting work for the Kidney Disease Project Review Committee; the Division of Arthritic, Metabolic, and Digestive Diseases of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) Public Health Service; and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of NIH. And, he currently serves as vice president of research for Meridian Medical Corporation of Seattle. To summarize his varied accomplishments, Babb likes to quote President Herbert Hoover, an engineer by training himself, who defined the profession as "clothing the bare bones of science with life, and comfort and hope." Throughout his career, Babb has managed to clothes those bones with all three.

Our local dues are essential to fund the programs of the section. Major expenses for this year include donations to Engineers’ Week, the ETEAC scholarship fund, newsletter costs, and paying to bring in national speakers to deliver talks to the local section. Unfortunately, about 43% of the national AIChE members who live in the East Tennessee section geography have not joined the local section by paying the $6 dues. If you receive a hardcopy newsletter, your mailing label notes whether you have paid local dues. If you receive a newsletter via email, the email message notes whether you have paid local dues. If you have not already, please join the local East Tennessee section of AIChE by sending $6 to: