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 US, 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 their 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.
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