POS-827 REFRAMING THE ISN VIDEO LEGACY PROJECT THIRTY YEARS ON WITH PANDEMIC INFLUENCES

Introduction: Working with The International Society of Nephrology (ISN), Kim Solez and J Stewart Cameron created the Video Legacy Project (VLP) in 1990 to document the lives of the key figures that founded Kidney Medicine and highlight the history of Kidney Medicine within the medical community These recordings were made on VHS tapes, but it became obvious that digitization of the material was essential, and this also was undertaken as the 21st century began Transplantation and transplant pathology were important parts of the project It is hard to imagine a medical subspecialty without any video history at all, but that fate almost befell kidney medicine when funding was removed from the ISN Video Legacy Project in 2007 During the ISN council meeting of 2006, the idea of making the interviews freely available on the Internet was proposed but this did not actually happen A major feature of the project was not to impose a standard format but allow subjects to talk in an unscripted manner and for as long they wanted For a time, 3 of the 45 video interviews were accessible on the ISN website, but then the site was restructured and for 8 years none of the videos were accessible We need to be reminded of the inconsistency of a rolling present through understanding of how present hypotheses, concepts and treatment recommendations came about Despite a strong movement amongst professional historians to downgrade the role of “great men” in the progress of ideas, these ideas in sum came from an endless series of talented individuals Hearing directly on video from this series of such men and women, almost all of whom have now passed away, not only gives a vivid idea of their characters but also an insight into how their minds worked Methods: The videotapes recorded between 1990 and 2007 were kept in temperature-controlled storage until the difficult Canadian winter of 2017-18 when they languished in the senior author's unheated garage Conventional wisdom held that the information on the tapes was fugitive and that by this time they would all be unreadable On a whim, we submitted them for conversion to mp4 video files in April-June 2018 and every tape was readable! We combined the footage with the Pioneers of European Nephrology series obtained by ERA-EDTA and today there is a collection of 177 videos on the Nephrology Video Legacy playlist and 82 videos on the Nephrology Pioneers playlist both of which can be found on the YouTube Channel of Kim Solez Some videos recorded in 2019 were reduced to audio-only with the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Europe in 2020 http://www youtube com/user/kimsolez Results: Top videos included: Homer Smith Comical Film About Function of the Kidney from 1950s, Wilhelm Kolff Video Legacy Interview 1995, Donald W Seldin Video Legacy Interview 1997, Resurrecting Video Legacy Project Apr 19 2018, Robert H Heptinstall Video Legacy Interview October 1995 Conclusions: Many of the people interviewed such as Homer Smith, Robert Heptinstall, J Stewart Cameron, John Dirks, and Gabriel Richet had an important influence on the senior author’s direction of the Banff Transplant Pathology Meetings and the spirit and philosophy of those meetings George Orwell wrote “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history ” It is comforting that in the end this did not happen to nephrology No conflict of interest