Within a building secluded behind iron gates, in a laboratory painted black, two men in black masks and long hooded black robes stand over an operating table. One is tall and one is short, and of course they are trying to create life — any fan of horror movies knows that.
But this is no movie: it is quite true, a little-known piece of early-20th-century medical history that segues seamlessly into the living horror of World War II. The tall man was Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviator, and the short man was Dr. Alexis Carrel, at one time probably the most famous physician in the world. A French surgeon transplanted to New York’s prestigious Rockefeller Institute, Carrel won a 1912 for devising surgical techniques to cut and connect blood vessels.
Jan 7, 2019 - Alexis Carrel Hide. French surgeon and biologist. Alexis Carrel 02.jpg. Alexis Carrel from Bain Collection.jpg 620 × 949; 88 KB. Alexis Carrel (French: [alɛksi kaʁɛl]; 28 June 1873 – 5 November 1944) was a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques.
He performed the first primitive coronary artery bypass surgery on a dog in 1910, and his tissue culture experiments in the 1920s and 1930s paved the way for today’s tissue grafts. Lindbergh, a mechanical wizard casting around for a worthwhile project after his 1927 trans-Atlantic flight, came up with some ideas for fixing his sister-in-law’s damaged heart valves, and was given an introduction to Carrel. The heart valve ideas proved impractical, but the two clicked instantly. Scientifically they were a good match: one with sophisticated medical ambitions and the other with the engineering skills to make them happen. They were also philosophic soul mates, both interested in eugenics and the perfection of the species. In fact, one of Carrel’s long-lived experiments at the Rockefeller Institute consisted of a large colony of mice bred specifically to create “heroic” supermice — large, fit and savage. The duo’s scientific triumph came in 1935, after a few false starts and much impassioned conversation about the betterment of mankind.
Bent over that black operating table (Carrel thought that an all-black environment made cleanliness easier to maintain) the surgeon removed a cat’s thyroid gland and Lindbergh attached the gland to a pump he had designed. It was the first pump that could perfuse a large mammalian organ with nutrients and oxygen while reliably forestalling infection. The organ could actually be stored on a shelf, ready for future use. Alexis Carrel, top, and above with Charles A. Credit Time Life Pictures/Getty Images And that thyroid gland was more than just preserved: still dutifully producing thyroid hormone, it seemed eerily alive. It lasted only a few weeks, but it was soon replaced by a row of other pump-maintained organs, including a cat’s ovary that continued to ovulate on the pump.
Small wonder the newspapers of the time went wild: “One Step Nearer to Immortality,” one headline read. The scientific success only fueled Lindbergh and Carrel’s philosophic zeal: if immortality was indeed on the horizon, it certainly should not be for everyone.
In his 1935 best seller 'Man, the Unknown,' Carrel urgently argued for the creation of biologic classes, with the weak and sick at one end, and the strong and fit (long might they live, propagate and receive new organs as needed) at the other. The sorting was to be accomplished by a council of scientific experts much like himself.
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Lindbergh, meanwhile, suffering through the kidnapping and murder of his oldest son, and the miserable press orgy that followed, became less and less inclined to tolerate any part of the common man. Living in Europe to avoid the paparazzi in the United States, he was soon vocally admiring the order and precision of Nazi Germany. Slowly the two men were swept away from the laboratory and into the caldron of international events, Lindbergh as a frequent visitor and aviation consultant to Germany, Carrel as self-appointed protector of the human species. When war broke out in Europe, Lindbergh, back in the United States, threw his energies into the isolationist America First movement.
Carrel, forced to retire from the Rockefeller Institute, returned to Paris where, financed by the collaborationist Vichy government, he actually succeeded in assembling his council of scientific experts. He died in 1944, at age 71, before he and his experts could do too much damage. Lindbergh, of course, lived on into the modern world, long enough to recreate himself as a conservationist, and to expunge the more offensive anti-Semitic sentiments from his wartime diaries before publication. Friedman’s book is difficult to put down — seldom is the interface between science, history and morality so clearly highlighted as by the careers of these two men. His story is so good that it is easy to forgive him a few failings.
He is guilty of some overly portentous prose of the “could he have known?” variety. The first half of the book, with its detailed descriptions of various pumps, sorely needs some diagrams. The epilogue cries out for a meatier update on modern vascular and transplant surgery, where some of Carrel’s suturing techniques are still in use, although most of his other work has long been supplanted.
But for a demonstration of the bizarrely particulate nature of human intelligence, which allows scientific brilliance and moral idiocy to thrive side by side, forget Jekyll, Hyde and Frankenstein: this is the book to read.
Alexis Carrel was a doctor and researcher who studied tissue cultures. He continued Ross Granville Harrison’s research and produced many improvements in the field of tissue culture and surgery. He was the recipient of the 1912 for his development of surgical techniques to repair blood vessels. Carrel was born on 28 June 1873 in Sainte-Foy-les-Lyon, France, to Anne-Marie Ricard and Billiard. His father died when he was five years old.
Carrel earned a bachelor’s degree in letters in 1889 and another in science in 1890 from St. Joseph’s Day School in Lyon, France. He entered medical school at the age of seventeen and was regarded as a good but not exceptional student. The assassination of Sadi Carnot, a French politician visiting Lyon who was stabbed in the abdomen and died from the loss of blood, further interested him in surgery. At the turn of the century vascular injuries were considered to be impossible to repair through surgery. While in medical school Carrel studied blood vessel repair and published a series of papers on sutures and bacterial infection.
He received a doctorate in medicine from the in 1900. In 1903 Carrel published the story of a woman seeking miraculous treatment for tuberculosis at the Grotto of Lourdes, France.
The medical community scorned Carrel’s report and ostracized him. Soon afterward Carrel failed to pass the competitive exams required for a full faculty position at the. After two consecutive failures, he left for the United States. In America Carrel accepted a position at the in 1904. At Chicago Carrel improved and developed numerous surgical techniques while collaborating with.
One important improvement they made was the introduction of sterile techniques to mitigate bacterial infections. Carrel published twenty-six papers in Chicago but only included Guthrie on twenty-one of them. Guthrie was angered and stopped collaborating with Carrel because he felt that Carrel published important work alone. Carrel became a nationally renowned surgeon and won the 1912 Nobel Prize for his development of the anastomotic technique and other surgical procedures.
In 1914 Carrel was drafted into the French army to fight in. During the war he noticed the atrocious conditions for the treatment of battle wounds and requested funds from the for research into more effective treatments. He and developed a solution for cleaning wounds, called Dakin's solution, which is still in use. After, Carrel returned to the. Carrel continued his research after winning the.
He began to work on tissue culture in 1910. In collaboration with, Carrel published a series of papers outlining his success with tissue culture. He also published a “simple” technique that included complicated jargon and included some superfluous steps. Carrel included many requirements in his technique that were available to surgeons but not to many lab scientists.
This initially discouraged the widespread use of tissue culture throughout science. A series of more and less important innovations were made in the Carrel lab. He and his lab members wore all black in his operating theater to maintain absolute sterility.
They clotted plasma, a growth substrate, on a silk cloth so that it could be more easily transferred. They also introduced the, a piece of glassware with a sloped neck to prevent dust particles from falling into the tissue culture. These advances helped to establish and improve the longevity of tissue cultures. The group also ran into a series of problems.
The most important hurdle was the development of culture media. Although some discoveries were made, Carrel never produced a definitive, successful medium. Another problem was exposed in the evaluation of potential media. Carrel needed a method to measure cellular growth so the expansion of the area occupied by cells was used for analysis. Carrel also confused the problem of cell growth in culture. A review of his 1924 paper on tissue culture in the Lancet stated that Carrel’s definition of growth did not include cell division, but rather the formation of whole cells directly from the. Carrel did not seem to believe that cells could spontaneously arise but the confusion of terms hindered the acceptance of his techniques.
In following years, reviews of the tissue culture field found that his technique was more simple than first considered and Carrel’s prophecy that tissue culture would become one of the most important techniques in biology was realized. Carrel was credited with keeping a culture of embryonic heart alive for thirty-four years. It is unlikely that this was normal tissue since the Hayflick limit prevents normal vertebrate cells from dividing indefinitely. Carrel also collaborated with Charles Lindbergh to build a perfusion pump capable of maintaining organs for several weeks in 1935. Also in 1935 Carrel summarized his research in a popular book called, which included his views on science and philosophy.
In the book Carrel discussed his highly conservative views on topics including women’s place in society and criminal punishment. He also promoted the benefits of an authoritarian government, to his later detriment. Carrel was forced to retire from the in 1939 and returned to France. In 1940 he was captured by the invading Germans and was allowed to continue with his plans to develop a “Foundation for the Study of Human Problems.” For this work he was labeled as a collaborator with the Germans. His philosophies introduced in bolstered the evidence against him as a German collaborator. When the Americans liberated France, Carrel was relieved of his position. Died on 5 November 1944 in France.
Sources. Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1901–1921. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1967. Dente, Christopher J., and David V. “Alexis Carrel (1873–1944): Nobel Laureate, 1912.” Archives of Surgery (Chicago, Ill: 1960) 140 (2005): 609–10. Greider, Carol W.
“Telomeres and Senescence: The History, the Experiment, the Future,” Current Biology 8 (1998): R178–81. McMurray, Emily J., ed. Notable Twentieth-Century Scientists. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1995. Witkowski, Jan A.
“Alexis Carrel and the Mysticism of Tissue Culture,” Medical History 23 (1979): 279–296. How to cite Navis, Adam R., 'Alexis Carrel (1873-1944)'. Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2008-02-29). ISSN: 1940-5030 Publisher Arizona State University.
School of Life Sciences. Center for Biology and Society. Embryo Project Encyclopedia. Rights © Arizona Board of Regents Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Last modified Wednesday, July 4, 2018 - 04:40 Topic Subject Tissue Culture Techniques; Carrel, Alexis, 1873-1944; People.