Customer Reviews (1)

Someone has often done IT already!
This is a beautifully written and produced monograph concerning one of the most outstanding practical and scientific surgeons who has ever lived or likely to do do so. Every medical student should know about him, but sadly, almost none do. Certainly every trainee cardiovascular surgeon should know about him and his work in detail, but, alas, hardly any of us do.

Thus we, are indebted to Dr Edwards and the publishers for bringing this delightful short book and its Nobel Prize winning subject to our attention ... Read more

Book Description

He was one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of best–selling biographies and a hit movie, as well as the inspiration for a dance step – the Lindy Hop – he himself was too shy to try. But for all the attention lavished on Charles Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. Together this oddest of couples – one a brilliant surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies – embarked on a secret quest to achieve immortality.

Their endeavor began on November 28, 1930, in Carrel's laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, a haven created by the world's richest man, John D. Rockefeller, so that medical investigators could pursue their wildest dreams, freed from the demands of clinical practice. For Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for pioneering organ transplants, that dream was conquering death. But not for everyone – only a special few.

In one of his more ghoulish experiments, Carrel removed the heart from a chick embryo and placed it in a glass jar, where, with special cleansing and feeding, he kept it alive, with no signs of aging, far beyond the species' natural life span. That result, Carrel believed, suggested that natural death wasn't inevitable.

But to attempt such a test with humans, Carrel needed a mechanical genius to create a device in which severed human organs could live and function indefin–itely. Might that genius be the handsome pilot who astonished the world in May 1927 by flying alone across the Atlantic – a feat even most pilots had thought impos–sible – in a single–engine airplane he designed himself?

Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Mad–man, and all true, The Immortalists is the remarkable story of how two men of prodigious achievement, and equally large character flaws, challenged nature's oldest rule, with consequences – personal, professional, and political – neither man anticipated.

Customer Reviews (5)

A clear look at the time Lindbergh and Carrel worked together on organ transplantation
This book centers on the period of Charles Lindbergh's life when he was working with Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.Carrel had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912 for his work on suturing blood vessels.He had also been lauded for his method of disinfecting wounds with chlorine (this was decades prior to the development and use of antibiotics).They were both famous men and, when introduced, they found they had many interests and views in common.Lindbergh's sister-in-law, Elizabeth Morrow, had a very weak heart that was going to shorten her lifespan and he felt medicine should have a way of replacing worn out organs just as he replaced parts in an airplane engine.Carrel was the leading authority in that field at that time and their work together is the central story of this book.

During their years of working together, Lindbergh designed and developed the world's first perfusion pump that allowed entire organs to be kept alive for extended periods without becoming infected.Both Lindbergh and Carrel were interested in pursuing an extended lifespan and rejected the inevitability of death.Of course, the popular press misunderstood what they were after and what Lindbergh had developed.It was regularly called a glass heart or an artificial heart, but it wasn't.

Lindbergh and Carrel also shared similar views on the superiority of the European or White race and the necessity of preserving and defending it.They both saw the coming war in Europe as a disaster that might go far beyond the losses and devastation of the Great War (World War I, we call it).Yes, Lindbergh favored Germany over Britain, but not for the reasons usually ascribed to him.Yes, he and Carrel viewed Jews as a separate race and they talked of good and bad Jews.However, they also helped Jews including a former assistant who went on to a brilliant medical career.Carrel and his wife were also mystics and impressed the Lindberghs and many others in ways that would embarrass anyone of a scientific reputation today.

While I don't want to be seen as defending Lindbergh's views at this time in his life, it does have to be noted that eugenics was in the air and various strains of it were advocated by many famous people.Many of these advocates of this now discredited movement still have a solid reputation today (even if their views on eugenics are kept hush hush in popular discussions).And one can still hear eugenics arguments made today, but it is never called by that name.

Essentially, Lindbergh saw Germany's manufacturing efficiency, engineering supremacy, and military discipline as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.He did not want the United States drawn in to a war that would leave Europe vulnerable to an expansionist communist movement.Carrel shared his anti-war views.However, once war came, Carrel went back to France to help as best as he could with his medical abilities.His reputation was smeared and was called a collaborationist, but all evidence shows this was not true.Lindbergh wanted to enlist, but was blackballed by FDR, so he went to the Pacific theater and flew several dozens of combat missions as a uniformed civilian.He shot down enemy fighters, dropped bombs, engaged in air battles, and shot up Japanese military assets on the ground.

After the war, Lindbergh's views on religion, science, and nature changed.He became a pioneering environmentalist and stirred up as much controversy supporting species preservation and natural habitat as he had when he was speaking against the United States entering World War II.

This is a very interesting story and supplements Berg's famous biography of Lindbergh.The author, David Friedman, even quotes from Berg's "Lindbergh" a few times.This is a well-balanced book that shows the complications of these men without feeling the need to make simplistic judgments or justifications.I found it very much worth reading.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Brilliant analysis of two brilliant minds (perhaps three)
Never having read a real biography of Lindberg, and never having heard of Alexis Carrel, this book introduced me to a new universe of thought.Friedman is empathetic and compassionate when he describes the tragic (as in Greek tragedy, a flaw that dooms greatness) shortcomings of men he obviously very much admires.Carrel and Lindberg thought of themselves, with some justification, as Olympians.Carrel didn't suffer fools gladly - or at all - but he comes across as a far more human being than the driven, dispassionate, aloof Lindberg.It's easy to understand Lindberg's fascination with Nazism - all that counts is getting the trains to run on time, no matter whose bodies lie across the tracks.Friedman paints two very complex pictures of 'great men', and great men they truly were, and their close personal and professional relationships.Friedman also portrays Ann Morrow Lindberg as a brilliant although self-doubting artist of great sensitivity.Reading of Lindberg's treatment of his wife reinforces the general portrait of a cold, humorless, obsessive tyrant.Finally, the author gives the reader enough detail to understand the what, how and why of the Carrel/Lindberg quest for immortality through organ replacement without ever losing me in a flood of technical minutia.One of the most fascinating tales I've ever read and extremely well told.

Lindbergh and Carrel spoke for many intellectuals.
Charles Lindbergh's and Alexis Carrel's views on eugenics, democracy and race don't sound so unusual when you consider how many European, British and American writers in the early 20th Century professed similar beliefs. H.G. Wells, for example, would have agreed with much of what Carrel writes in "Man, the Unknown," especially about the need for a technocratic elite to make binding decisions (including reproductive ones) for the whole world. Nobel Prize winning geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller advocated eugenics like his fellow Nobelist Carrel (an enthusiasm Muller failed to convey to his student Carl Sagan). H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, now held in higher regard than during his lifetime, expresses a disgust with non-Anglo immigrants, race mixing and racial degeneration. And many American science fiction writers during the field's "golden age" in the 1930-1960 era professed similar racist, Social-Darwinist, elitist and anti-democratic sentiments.

Today's elites at least have the sense not to promote such beliefs in public, even if they express them privately. The open avowal of racism has moved down the social scale, along with fighting duels to settle disputes over matters of "honor." The individual today who expresses racist beliefs, or regularly gets into street fights, signals himself as lower class.

Ironically, Lindbergh's and Carrel's other ideas, about treating the human body as a machine with potentially replaceable parts and greatly extending human life thereby, make them seem remarkably visionary even by 21st Century standards. You have to wonder how far they could have gotten if Carrel had secured funding for his own lab after the Rockefeller Institute had forcibly retired him, and trained a scientist to carry on the work with Lindbergh after his death; and if Lindbergh's crushes on Goering and Hitler hadn't distracted him from helping Carrel with their joint project. Lindbergh and Carrel's experiments anticipated today's research into regenerative medicine, engineered negligible senescence and transhumanism.

Other interesting aspects of the book: We think we have a celebrity-obsessed culture now, but Lindbergh and his family received a level of press harassment that looks extreme even by today's standards. And Carrel combined legitimate scientific accomplishments with some very crank-sounding ideas, especially about the paranormal; today he would make a plausible guest for "Coast to Coast AM."

I would have given the book more stars, but Friedman really hadn't done enough homework to show how Lindbergh's and Carrel's less defensible beliefs (from our perspective) reflected the thinking of many early 20th Century intellectuals. These intellectuals' beliefs formed a continuum with what became official policy in Nazi Germany. They didn't arise in a vacuum, in other words.

Great...but how does he know?
I enjoyed this book a lot, having learned much more about Lindbergh than I ever knew, especially his apparent eventual repudiation of eugenics and the Nazis and his new-found commitment to environmentalism.

But how does Friedman know about all the thoughts Lindbergh had as he reassesses his values in light of particular experiences? The notes at the back, which provide references for particular lines of many pages, in many cases do not present the evidence that Friedman learned all of this from Lindbergh's journals or other sources. Ths was a problem for me - a kind of imaginary mind-reading that I became somewhat skeptical of. So I considered giving the book just four stars, but, heck, it was a really good read!

Collaboration Creates Value
David M. Friedman's book is further evidence that people often accomplish more collaboratively than they do working alone. Friedman explores the interplay between Charles Lindbergh, the pilot who flew the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic, and Dr. Alexis Carrel, a famous French surgeon who won a Nobel Prize in 1912. Their goal was to advance medicine and achieve nothing short of immortality, at least for those they deemed worth preserving. While Carrel had the medical talent, he needed an engineering genius to develop a device in which human organs could live and function indefinitely. Lindbergh produced a pump that maintained a series of animal organs. The Carrel and Lindbergh collaboration laid the groundwork for open heart surgery, organ transplants and the artificial heart. Friedman offers a well-researched, balanced view that includes shortcomings as well as triumphs of these collaborators. Also, Friedman makes it clear that these early successes in organ transplant research required complimentary skills and meeting of the minds that collaboration entails.The Culture of Collaboration ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Malinin on Carrel
Malinin has captured what is indeed the "extraordinary" life and career of Alexis Carrel (1873-1944). Carrel was born in Lyon, France in 1873, emigrated to the United States in 1905, and between 1905 and 1912made incredible advances in medicine. Most of his research focused on howto keep a human organ alive outside the body. In 1912 he was the recipientof the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for developing a practicaltechnique to suture veins and arteries, thus making new and morecomplicated surgical techniques available to physicians and patients. Hewrote several books in English and French, including (in English) THETREATMENT OF INFECTED WOUNDS (1917), MAN, THE UNKNOWN (1935), THE CULTUREOF ORGANS (1938), THE VOYAGE TO LOURDES (1950), and REFLECTIONS ON LIFE(1952). Carrel counted among his friends Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, andCharles Lindbergh (with whom he invented an electric prototype for anartificial heart pump). His reflections on life constitute a Christianized elitist philosophy about the future of humanity. He returned to France onretirement in 1939 and continued to write, mostly works on prayer and hisvarious pilgrimages, until his death in 1944. Named in Carrel's honor arethe Foundation Alexis Carrel and the Instituto Alexis Carrel--educationalinstitutions which focus on cardiovascular medicine. Malinin's bookprovides the reader with a comprehensive view of Carrel the surgeon andCarrel the philosopher. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Alexis (Marie Joseph Auguste Billiard) Carrel, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2632 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
First US edition of this landmark book. ... Read more