Carrel, Alexis

(b. Lyons, France, 28 June 1873;d. Paris, France, 5 November 1944),

surgery, experimental biology.

He was the eldest child of Alexis Carrel–Billiard, a textile manufacturer, and his wife, Anne–Marie Ricard, both from bourgeois Roman Catholic families. When Alexis was five years old, his father died, and the three children were brought up by their devout and solicitous mother. Alexis was sent to a Jesuit day school and college near his home in Lyons. As a schoolboy he showed an interest in biology by dissecting birds. Encouraged by an uncle, he conducted experiments in chemistry. After taking his baccalaureate he entered the University of Lyons in 1890 as a student of medicine. He was attached to hospitals at Lyons from 1893 to 1900, except for a year as surgeon in the French army’s Chasseurs Alpins. His talent for anatomy and operative surgery became apparent when in 1898 he was attached to the laboratory of the celebrated anatomist J. –L. Testut. In 1900 he received his formal medical degree from the University of Lyons.

Carrel became interested in surgery of the blood vessels about 1894, inspired, it is said, by the death of President Carnot from an assassin’s bullet, which cut a major artery. Such wounds could not at that time be successfully repaired. He developed extraordinary skill in using the finest needles and devised a method of turning back the ends of cut vessels like cuffs, so that he could unite them end–to–end without exposing the circulating blood to any other tissue than the smooth lining of the vessel. By this device and by coating his instruments, needles, and thread with paraffin jelly, he avoided blood clotting that might obstruct flow through the sutured artery or vein. He avoided bacterial infection by a most exacting aseptic technique. His first successes in suturing blood vessels were announced in 1902.

This brilliant achievement did not spare Carrel from difficulties, brought on partly by his critical attitude toward what he considered the antiquated traditions and political atmosphere of the Lyons medical faculty. Finding a university career blocked by local opposition, he left Lyons and after a year of advanced medical studies in Paris went in 1904 to the United States. At the University of Chicago, where he was given an assistantship in physiology, he resumed his experiments in blood–vessel surgery, applying his methods to such difficult feats as kidney transplants in animals. His growing reputation for surgical skill, bold experimentation, and technical originality won him in 1906 appointment as Member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) in New York. There he resumed his surgical experimentation. Subsequent progress in surgery of the heart and blood vessels and in transplantation of organs has rested upon the foundation he laid down between 1904 and 1908.

Carrel’s pioneer successes with organ transplants led him to dream of cultivating human tissues and even whole organs as substitutes for diseased or damaged parts. He seized at once upon the work of Ross G. Harrison of Yale University, who announced in 1908 the cultivation of frog’s nerve cells in vitro. Bringing to this kind of research his own dexterity, inventiveness, and command of asepsis, Carrel succeeded in cultivating the cells of warm–blooded animals outside the body. To prove his results in the face of skepticism, he began his famous undertaking to keep such a culture alive and growing indefinitely, using a bit of tissue from the heart of an embryo chick. He kept this strain of connective–tissue cells alive for many years; in the care of one of his assistants it outlived Carrel himself. Although he did not add greatly, by his largely methodological achievement, to the understanding of cellular physiology, in other hands tissue culture has contributed greatly not only to scientific theory but to practice as well—for example, the growing of virus cultures in animal cell and the preparation of vaccines. In 1912 he received the Nobel Prize for his surgical and cell–culture experiments.

Carrel was married in 1913 to Anne de la Motte de Meyrie, a devout Roman Catholic widow with one son. The couple had no children of their own. Recalled in 1914 to service in the French army during World War I, Carrel conducted a hospital and research center near the front lines, where Mme. Carrel assisted him as a surgical nurse. With the aid of a chemist, Henry B. Dakin, he developed a method of treating severely infected wounds, which although often effective was too complicated for general use and has been supplanted by the use of antibiotics.

About 1930 Carrel undertook another far–reaching experimental program, aimed at the cultivation of whole organs. In this work he was aided by the celebrated aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, who devised a sterilizable glass pump for circulating culture fluid through an excised organ. Carrel was thus enabled to keep such organs as the thyroid gland and kidney alive and, to a certain extent, functioning for days or weeks. This was a pioneer step in the development of apparatus now used in surgery of the heart and great vessels.

Carrel’s naturally religious, even mystical, temperament led him to speculate on the great problems of human destiny. In a widely read book, Man the Unknown (1935), he expressed the hope that scientific enlightenment might confer upon mankind the boons of freedom from disease, long life, and spiritual advancement, under the leadership of an intellectual elite.

He retired from the Rockefeller Institute in 1938 and, after the outbreak of World War II, returned to Paris, hoping to serve his native country by a grandiose program to safeguard and improve the population by scientific nutrition, public hygiene, and eugenics. During the German occupation he remained in Paris at the head of a self–created Institute for the Study of Human Problems. His acceptance of support from Vichy and his negotiations with the German command on behalf of his institute led to exaggerated charges of collaborationism. His death from heart failure aggravated by the hardships of life in wartime Paris spared him the indignity of arrest. Although not a fully orthodox churchman, he received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church and was interred in a chapel at his home on the island of St. Gildas, off the coast of Brittany.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Original Works. Carrel’s writings include Man the Unknown (New York, 1938); The Culture of Organs (New York, 1938), written with Charles A. Lindbergh; La Prière (Paris, 1944), English trans., Prayer (New York, 1948); Le Voyage à Lourdes (Paris, 1949), English trans., with an intro. by Charles A. Lindbergh, Voyage to Lourdes (New York, 1950); and Réflexions sur la vie (Paris, 1952), English trans., Reflections on Life (London, 1952). A bibliography of his numerous scientific and popular articles is included in Soupault’s biography, cited below.

II. Secondary Literature. The definitive biography is Robert Soupault, Alexis Carrel, 1873–1944 (Paris, 1952), in French, with portraits and a full bibliography. See also Mme. Carrel’s preface to Reflections on Life; George W. Corner, History of the Rockefeller Institute (New York, 1965); Henriette Delaye–Didier–Delorme, Alexis Carrel, Humaniste Chrétien (Paris, 1964); Joseph T. Durkin, Hope for Our Time: Alexis Carrel on Man and Society (New York, 1965); and Alfonso M. Moreno, Triunfo y ruina de una vida: Alexis Carrel (Madrid, 1961).

Carrel’s correspondence and scientific records are at the library of Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

George W. Corner

CARREL, ALEXIS 1873-1944

America's first nobel prize winner in medicine-scientist and eccentric philosopher

The Threads of Life

Alexis Carrel was born in Lyons, France, on 28 June 1873. He became a physician in Lyons, began his experimental work in surgery in 1902, and then immigrated to the United States in 1904, When the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research opened its doors in New York in 1906, it included Carrel among its outstanding investigators. In 1912 the Nobel Prize Committee awarded him the first Nobel Prize in medicine given to an American in recognition of his work on the suturing together of blood vessels and the transplantation of blood vessels and organs. The development of this technique laid the foundation for vascular surgery, heart surgery, and transplantation of organs.

Eccentric Philosopher

In the 1930s Carrel became one of the first medical scientists in America to attract widespread public attention. In 1935, late in his career as a laboratory scientist, he wrote a nonmedical book, Man, the Unknown, which became a best-seller. In this work he presented his social views and his ideas for an institute that would study "man as a whole" and develop "leaders" for the state. His book became popular because he voiced the public concern of the time that science was not doing enough for humanity and that the rapid development of technology might be detrimental to mankind. To widen the popular appeal of his work, he included several topics, such as sex, which in those days was not often discussed in popular writing. He also proposed that dangerous criminals and the criminally insane should be "humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases , .. Modern society should not hesitate to organize itself with reference to the normal individual. Philosophical systems and sentimental prejudices must give way before such a necessity." Liberal minds were disturbed that a book such as this became a best-seller in the year Mussolini attacked Ethiopia and Hitler enacted the Nuremberg Laws. They were also troubled by the effect Carrel might have upon his most famous associate, America's greatest hero, aviator Charles A. Lindbergh.

Charles A. Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel. With Lindbergh, Carrel made the headlines again in 1935, when they announced the development of a mechanical "heart," in which the heart, kidney, and other internal organs of an animal could be kept alive for study in glass chambers supplied by circulation of artificial blood. Carrel's medical work provided him with a longstanding interest in the preservation of tissues and organs for surgical use and transplantation, but he was unable to succeed in perfecting a system to allow an organ to survive outside of the body. Lindbergh's involvement in this biological problem came when his sister-in-law's heart was damaged by rheumatic fever. Physicians told him that heart repair was impossible because the heart could not be stopped long enough for surgeons to work on it. Lindbergh saw this as an engineering problem; he undertook to develop a pump that could take over the heart's functions during surgery, and he pressed his physiological questions upon his family doctors. One of them offered to introduce him to a man he knew, a medical researcher who was working on the problem of a heart pump. On 28 November 1930 Lindbergh met Carrel. There was an immediate rapport between the tall, lean aviator and the short, stocky, pink-faced scientist, and together they set to work, announcing the success of their collaboration in 1935. The relationship between them was particularly intense in the middle and late 1930s. When Lindbergh exiled himself to England in 1936, the two men were drawn even closer together, visiting with each other on Carrel's island off the coast of Brittany. Many of the philosophical concepts Lindbergh held in later life, such as his later writings on the wisdom of nature and natural selection, can be traced to his association with Carrel.

Philosopher and Mystic

When Carrel had to retire from the Rockefeller Institute because of his age in 1939, he had become more of a philosopher and mystic than a productive scientist. Carrel was the first Rockefeller scientist to be forced to retire under the institute's new mandatory retirement policy. His entire Division of Experimental Surgery was closed, and his staff disbanded, when he reached the age of sixty-five. It is possible that the division's dissolution may have been directed at Lindbergh rather than at Carrel. The administration of the Rockefeller Institute did not wish to be associated with political stands, and by this time Lindbergh had begun to be controversial on the scene of national politics. When World War II broke out, Carrel returned to France and joined a special mission for the French Ministry of Public Health. He ended his days there in 1944 amid the confusion of World War II and its aftermath.

Sources:

Kenneth S. Davis, The Hero, Charles A. Lindbergh and the American Dream (New York: Doubleday, 1959);

Theodore I. Malinin, Surgery and Life. The Extraordinary Career of Alexis Carrel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979);

Walter S. Ross, The Last Hero: Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harper &Row, 1964).

Alexis Carrel

The French-American surgeon and Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) developed surgical techniques that marked the beginning of modern work in transplanting organs.

Alexis Carrel was born in Sainte-Foy-les-Lyon, France, on June 28, 1873. He graduated from the University of Lyons with a bachelor of letters degree in 1889, followed the next year by a bachelor of science degree; and, in 1900, by a medical degree. He taught anatomy and operative surgery at Lyons, beginning experimental research there. Carrel's particular interest in vascular surgery, however, met with little approval at Lyons. In 1904 he migrated to Canada and a year later to Chicago, where he was associated with the Hull Physiology Laboratory.

In 1906 Carrel joined the new Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. He became a fellow of the institute in 1909, a member in 1912, and member emeritus in 1939. Here he did research in vascular surgery, directing attention to organ transplantation and vascular suture. He recognized that the replacement or transplantation of organs was possible only if circulation without hemorrhage or thrombosis could be reestablished in the organ. For the successful techniques he developed in vascular anastomosis, Carrel was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1912.

In 1913 Carrel married Anna de la Motte. During World War I he served in the French Army Medical Corps and, with the chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin, developed sodium hypochlorite for the sterilization of deep wounds.

After the war he returned to the Rockefeller Institute. In 1935 Carrel and Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviator, announced methods by which the heart and other organs of an animal could be kept alive in glass chambers supplied by a circulation of artificial blood. In 1938 they published The Culture of Organs.

Carrel's most popular book, Man the Unknown (1935), deals with a range of scientific concepts and argues that man is in a position to control his destiny and reach perfection through eugenics, or selective reproduction. During World War II he was accused of Nazi sympathy because of these ideas.

Upon retirement in 1939 from the Rockefeller Institute, Carrel went to France. In 1940 he returned to the United States on a special mission to study man and the environment. At the time of his death in Paris on Nov. 5, 1944, he was director of the Vichy government's Carrel Foundation for the Study of Human Problems.

Further Reading

Carrel's Reflections on Life was translated from the French by Antonia White (1953). Two full-length studies of him are Robert Soupault, Alexis Carrel, 1873-1944 (1952), and Joseph T. Durkin, Hope for One Time: Alexis Carrel on Man and Society (1965). A good introduction to Carrel is the chapter in Theodore L. Sourkes, Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine and Physiology, 1901-1965 (1966).

Additional Sources

Malinin, Theodore I., Surgery and life: the extraordinary career of Alexis Carrel, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

May, Angelo M., The two lions of Lyons: the tale of two surgeons, Alexis Carrel and René Leriche, Rockville, MD: Kabel Publishers, 1992. □

Carrel, Alexis (1873-1944)

French surgeon and biologist with a philosophical interest in the unknown possibilities of mankind. Born at Sainte-Foy-les Lyons, France, June 28, 1873, Carrel studied at the Universities of Dijon and Lyons, obtaining his M.D. in 1900. In 1904 he went to Canada, hoping to raise cattle, but ended up instead pursuing his surgical skills at the Hull Physiological Laboratory, Chicago. In 1906 he became a staff member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and in 1912 received a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine for his work on vascular surgery and transplantation of organs. He joined the French army in World War I and with Henry Drysdale Dakin developed the Carrel-Dakin solution for sterilizing infected wounds. His philosophical interests came to the forefront in his first book, Man the Unknown (1935), which became a best-seller.

During World War II Carrel lived in France and held an appointment as director of the Foundation for the Study of Human Relations under the Vichy government. After the war he was dismissed as a collaborationist, although it is probable that he was more interested in human biology and physiology than politics. He died in Paris, November 5, 1944. Two of his books, The Prayer (1948) and Voyage to Lourdes (1949), were published posthumously.

Sources:

Carrel, Alexis. Man the Unknown. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935.

——. Reflections on Life. New York: Hawthorn, 1953.

——. Voyage to Lourdes. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950.

Alexis Carrel , 1873–1944, American surgeon and experimental biologist, b. near Lyons, France, M.D. Univ. of Lyons, 1900. Coming to the United States in 1905, he joined the staff of the Rockefeller Institute in 1906 and served as a member from 1912 to 1939. For his work in suturing blood vessels, in transfusion, and in transplantation of organs, he received the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In World War I he developed, with Henry D. Dakin, a method of treating wounds by irrigation with a sodium-hypochlorite solution. With Charles A. Lindbergh he invented an artificial, or mechanical, heart, by means of which he kept alive a number of different kinds of tissue and organs; he kept tissue from a chicken's heart alive for 32 years. In 1939 he returned to France. He wrote Man the Unknown (1935) and, with Lindbergh, The Culture of Organs (1938).