The 1989 Dallas Conference on Morbidity and Mortality in Dialysis

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I will attempt to recall, as best as my memory allows, what we learned from the 1989 Dallas Conference on Morbidity and Mortality and Prescription of Dialysis. These thoughts and opinions are my remembrance in the subsequent time period and therefore subject to the limitations of recall. Opinions expressed are my personal beliefs and cannot be verified by hardcore scientific data. Accept the thought process on the basis of recollection and my individual assessment of the issues discussed. It is surprising to me, in retrospect, what has occurred in the past 50 yr. It really is the history of clinical dialysis and kidney transplantation. Many of you may not be familiar with some of the earlier events, so I cover them briefly by decades. It will be difficult for many of us to realize that there were no self-defined nephrologists in the early part of the 1960s but only renal physiologists in some medical schools. The exceptions to this arrangement were led by a few brave pioneers, such as John Merrill in Boston, Belding Scribner in Seattle, and George Schreiner in Washington, DC. These men ignored the scorn of their academic colleagues and actually looked after patients with renal failure. The early effort of these individuals showed that it was possible to have patients recover from acute renal failure or even survive if their condition were chronic. Their results were exciting, capturing the public interests and making the cover of many national magazines, so the Public Health Service, in the mid-1960s, decided to offer 5-yr grants to determine whether chronic dialysis could be applied to the population at large. We obtained one of those grants in 1967 in Dallas. Finally, to close out the decade, a few courageous souls went into private practice as nephrologists, which became a board-certified specialty …