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 Lindbergh, the aviator, and the short man was 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 Nobel Prize for devising surgical techniques to cut and connect blood vessels. 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 and organ transplants.
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.
David M. Friedman, a veteran journalist, has ably extracted the story of Lindbergh and Carrel's scientific collaboration from existing biographies and new interviews with a few aging eyewitnesses. All told, the two worked together for less than a decade but, amazingly, their story has repercussions that linger today, both for good and for ill.
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.
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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