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 invented the first perfusion pump with
Charles A. Lindbergh opening the way to organ
transplantation. Like many intellectuals of
his time, he promoted eugenics.
He was a regent for the French Foundation
for the Study of Human Problems during Vichy
France which implemented the eugenics policies
there; his association with the Foundation
and with Jacques Doriot's ultra-nationalist
Parti Populaire Français led to investigations
of collaborating with the Nazis, but he died
before any trial could be held. He faced media
attacks towards the end of his life over his
alleged involvement with the Nazis.A Nobel
Prize laureate in 1912, Alexis Carrel was
also elected twice, in 1924 and 1927, as an
honorary member of the Academy of Sciences
of the USSR.
== Biography ==
Born in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, Rhône, Carrel
was raised in a devout Catholic family and
was educated by Jesuits, though he had become
an agnostic by the time he became a university
student. He was a pioneer in transplantology
and thoracic surgery. Alexis Carrel was also
a member of learned societies in the U.S.,
Spain, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium,
France, Vatican City, Germany, Italy and Greece
and received honorary doctorates from Queen's
University of Belfast, Princeton University,
California, New York, Brown University and
Columbia University.
In 1902, he was claimed to have witnessed
the miraculous cure of Marie Bailly at Lourdes,
made famous in part because she named Carrel
as a witness of her cure. After the notoriety
surrounding the event, Carrel could not obtain
a hospital appointment because of the pervasive
anticlericalism in the French university system
at the time. In 1903 he emigrated to Montreal,
Canada, but soon relocated to Chicago, Illinois
to work for Hull Laboratory. While there he
collaborated with American physician Charles
Claude Guthrie in work on vascular suture
and the transplantation of blood vessels and
organs as well as the head, and Carrel was
awarded the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine for these efforts.In 1906 he joined
the newly formed Rockefeller Institute of
Medical Research in New York where he spent
the rest of his career. There he did significant
work on tissue cultures with pathologist Montrose
Thomas Burrows. In the 1930s, Carrel and Charles
Lindbergh became close friends not only because
of the years they worked together but also
because they shared personal, political, and
social views. Lindbergh initially sought out
Carrel to see if his sister-in-law's heart,
damaged by rheumatic fever, could be repaired.
When Lindbergh saw the crudeness of Carrel's
machinery, he offered to build new equipment
for the scientist. Eventually they built the
first perfusion pump, an invention instrumental
to the development of organ transplantation
and open heart surgery. Lindbergh considered
Carrel his closest friend, and said he would
preserve and promote Carrel's ideals after
his death.Due to his close proximity with
Jacques Doriot's fascist Parti Populaire Français
(PPF) during the 1930s and his role in implementing
eugenics policies during Vichy France, he
was accused after the Liberation of collaboration,
but died before the trial.
In his later life he returned to his Catholic
roots. In 1939 he met with Trappist monk Alexis
Presse on a recommendation. Although Carrel
was skeptical about meeting with a priest,
Presse ended up having a profound influence
on the rest of Carrel's life. In 1942, he
said "I believe in the existence of God, in
the immortality of the soul, in Revelation
and in all the Catholic Church teaches." He
summoned Presse to administer the Catholic
Sacraments on his death bed in November 1944.For
much of his life, Carrel and his wife spent
their summers on the Île Saint-Gildas, which
they owned. After he and Lindbergh became
close friends, Carrel persuaded him to also
buy a neighboring island, the Ile Illiec,
where the Lindberghs often resided in the
late 1930s.
== Contributions to science ==
=== 
Vascular suture ===
Carrel was a young surgeon in 1894, when the
French president Sadi Carnot was assassinated
with a knife. Carnot bled to death due to
severing of his portal vein, and surgeons
who treated the president felt that the vein
could not be successfully reconnected. This
left a deep impression on Carrel, and he set
about developing new techniques for suturing
blood vessels. The technique of "triangulation",
using three stay-sutures as traction points
in order to minimize damage to the vascular
wall during suturing, was inspired by sewing
lessons he took from an embroideress and is
still used today. Julius Comroe wrote: "Between
1901 and 1910, Alexis Carrel, using experimental
animals, performed every feat and developed
every technique known to vascular surgery
today." He had great success in reconnecting
arteries and veins, and performing surgical
grafts, and this led to his Nobel Prize in
1912.
=== Wound antisepsis ===
During World War I (1914–1918), Carrel and
the English chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin developed
the Carrel–Dakin method of treating wounds
based on chlorine (Dakin's solution) which,
preceding the development of antibiotics,
was a major medical advance in the care of
traumatic wounds. For this, Carrel was awarded
the Légion d'honneur.
=== Organ transplants ===
Carrel co-authored a book with famed pilot
Charles A. Lindbergh, The Culture of Organs,
and worked with Lindbergh in the mid-1930s
to create the "perfusion pump," which allowed
living organs to exist outside the body during
surgery. The advance is said to have been
a crucial step in the development of open-heart
surgery and organ transplants, and to have
laid the groundwork for the artificial heart,
which became a reality decades later. Some
critics of Lindbergh claimed that Carrel overstated
Lindbergh's role to gain media attention,
but other sources say Lindbergh played an
important role in developing the device. Both
Lindbergh and Carrel appeared on the cover
of Time magazine on June 13, 1938.
=== Cellular senescence ===
Carrel was also interested in the phenomenon
of senescence, or aging. He claimed that all
cells continued to grow indefinitely, and
this became a dominant view in the early 20th
century. Carrel started an experiment on January
17, 1912, where he placed tissue cultured
from an embryonic chicken heart in a stoppered
Pyrex flask of his own design. He maintained
the living culture for over 20 years with
regular supplies of nutrient. This was longer
than a chicken's normal lifespan. The experiment,
which was conducted at the Rockefeller Institute
for Medical Research, attracted considerable
popular and scientific attention.Carrel's
experiment by some was never successfully
replicated, and in the 1960s Leonard Hayflick
and Paul Moorhead proposed that differentiated
cells can undergo only a limited number of
divisions before dying. This is known as the
Hayflick limit, and is now a pillar of biology.L.
Hayflick has shown that a cell has a limited
number of divisions, equal to the so called
"Hayflick’s Limit." However, L. Franks and
others (Loo et al. 1987; Nooden and Tompson
1995; Frolkis 1988a), have shown that the
number of cell divisions can be considerably
greater than that stipulated by the "Hayflick
Limit", having practically no limit at all.
It is not certain how Carrel obtained his
anomalous results. Leonard Hayflick suggests
that the daily feeding of nutrient was continually
introducing new living cells to the alleged
immortal culture. J. A. Witkowski has argued
that, while "immortal" strains of visibly
mutated cells have been obtained by other
experimenters, a more likely explanation is
deliberate introduction of new cells into
the culture, possibly without Carrel's knowledge.
=== Honors ===
In 1972, the Swedish Post Office honored Carrel
with a stamp that was part of its Nobel stamp
series. In 1979, the lunar crater Carrel was
named after him as a tribute to his scientific
breakthroughs.
In February 2002, as part of celebrations
of the 100th anniversary of Charles Lindbergh's
birth, the Medical University of South Carolina
at Charleston established the Lindbergh-Carrel
Prize, given to major contributors to "development
of perfusion and bioreactor technologies for
organ preservation and growth". Michael DeBakey
and nine other scientists received the prize,
a bronze statuette [2] created for the event
by the Italian artist C. Zoli and named "Elisabeth"
after Elisabeth Morrow, sister of Lindbergh's
wife Anne Morrow, who died from heart disease.
It was in fact Lindbergh's disappointment
that contemporary medical technology could
not provide an artificial heart pump which
would allow for heart surgery on her that
led to Lindbergh's first contact with Carrel.
== Alexis Carrel and Lourdes ==
In 1902 Alexis Carrel went from being a skeptic
of the visions and miracles reported at Lourdes
to being a believer in spiritual cures after
experiencing a healing of Marie Bailly that
he could not explain. The Catholic journal
Le nouvelliste reported that she named him
as the prime witness of her cure. Alexis Carrel
refused to discount a supernatural explanation
and steadfastly reiterated his beliefs, even
writing a book describing his experience,
though it was not published until four years
after his death. This was a detriment to his
career and reputation among his fellow doctors,
and feeling he had no future in academic medicine
in France, he emigrated to Canada with the
intention of farming and raising cattle. After
a brief period, he accepted an appointment
at the University of Chicago and two years
later at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical
Research.
== Man, The Unknown (1935, 1939) ==
In 1935, Carrel published a book titled L'Homme,
cet inconnu (Man, The Unknown), which became
a best-seller. In the book, he attempted to
outline a comprehensive account what is known
and more importantly unknown of the human
body and human life "in light of discoveries
in biology, physics, and medicine", to elucidate
problems of the modern world, and to provide
possible routes to a better life for human
beings.
For Carrel, the fundamental problem was that:
[M]en cannot follow modern civilization along
its present course, because they are degenerating.
They have been fascinated by the beauty of
the sciences of inert matter. They have not
understood that their body and consciousness
are subjected to natural laws, more obscure
than, but as inexorable as, the laws of the
sidereal world. Neither have they understood
that they cannot transgress these laws without
being punished. They must, therefore, learn
the necessary relations of the cosmic universe,
of their fellow men, and of their inner selves,
and also those of their tissues and their
mind. Indeed, man stands above all things.
Should he degenerate, the beauty of civilization,
and even the grandeur of the physical universe,
would vanish. ... Humanity’s attention must
turn from the machines of the world of inanimate
matter to the body and the soul of man, to
the organic and mental processes which have
created the machines and the universe of Newton
and Einstein.
Carrell advocated, in part, that mankind could
better itself by following the guidance of
an elite group of intellectuals, and by incorporating
eugenics into the social framework. He argued
for an aristocracy springing from individuals
of potential, writing:
We must single out the children who are endowed
with high potentialities, and develop them
as completely as possible. And in this manner
give to the nation a non-hereditary aristocracy.
Such children may be found in all classes
of society, although distinguished men appear
more frequently in distinguished families
than in others. The descendants of the founders
of American civilization may still possess
the ancestral qualities. These qualities are
generally hidden under the cloak of degeneration.
But this degeneration is often superficial.
It comes chiefly from education, idleness,
lack of responsibility and moral discipline.
The sons of very rich men, like those of criminals,
should be removed while still infants from
their natural surroundings. Thus separated
from their family, they could manifest their
hereditary strength. In the aristocratic families
of Europe there are also individuals of great
vitality. The issue of the Crusaders is by
no means extinct. The laws of genetics indicate
the probability that the legendary audacity
and love of adventure can appear again in
the lineage of the feudal lords. It is possible
also that the offspring of the great criminals
who had imagination, courage, and judgment,
of the heroes of the French or Russian Revolutions,
of the high-handed business men who live among
us, might be excellent building stones for
an enterprising minority. As we know, criminality
is not hereditary if not united with feeble-mindedness
or other mental or cerebral defects. High
potentialities are rarely encountered in the
sons of honest, intelligent, hard-working
men who have had ill luck in their careers,
who have failed in business or have muddled
along all their lives in inferior positions.
Or among peasants living on the same spot
for centuries. However, from such people sometimes
spring artists, poets, adventurers, saints.
A brilliantly gifted and well-known New York
family came from peasants who cultivated their
farm in the south of France from the time
of Charlemagne to that of Napoleon.
Carrel advocated the use of gasses to rid
humanity of "defectives", thus endorsing the
scientific racism discourse. His endorsement
of this idea began in the mid-1930s, prior
to the Nazi implementation of such practices
in Germany. In the 1936 German introduction
of his book, at the publisher's request, he
added the following praise of the Nazi regime
which did not appear in the editions in other
languages:
(t)he German government has taken energetic
measures against the propagation of the defective,
the mentally diseased, and the criminal. The
ideal solution would be the suppression of
each of these individuals as soon as he has
proven himself to be dangerous.
For the insane and the criminal, he endorsed
the use of gassing for euthanasia:
(t)he conditioning of petty criminals with
the whip, or some more scientific procedure,
followed by a short stay in hospital, would
probably suffice to insure order. Those who
have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic
pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children,
despoiled the poor of their savings, misled
the public in important matters, should be
humanely and economically disposed of in small
euthanasic institutions supplied with proper
gasses. A similar treatment could be advantageously
applied to the insane, guilty of criminal
acts.
Otherwise he endorsed voluntary positive eugenics.
He wrote:
We have mentioned that natural selection has
not played its part for a long while. That
many inferior individuals have been conserved
through the efforts of hygiene and medicine.
But we cannot prevent the reproduction of
the weak when they are neither insane nor
criminal. Or destroy sickly or defective children
as we do the weaklings in a litter of puppies.
The only way to obviate the disastrous predominance
of the weak is to develop the strong. Our
efforts to render normal the unfit are evidently
useless. We should, then, turn our attention
toward promoting the optimum growth of the
fit. By making the strong still stronger,
we could effectively help the weak; For the
herd always profits by the ideas and inventions
of the elite. Instead of leveling organic
and mental inequalities, we should amplify
them and construct greater men.
He continued:
The progress of the strong depends on the
conditions of their development and the possibility
left to parents of transmitting to their offspring
the qualities which they have acquired in
the course of their existence. Modern society
must, therefore, allow to all a certain stability
of life, a home, a garden, some friends. Children
must be reared in contact with things which
are the expression of the mind of their parents.
It is imperative to stop the transformation
of the farmer, the artisan, the artist, the
professor, and the man of science into manual
or intellectual proletarians, possessing nothing
but their hands or their brains. The development
of this proletariat will be the everlasting
shame of industrial civilization. It has contributed
to the disappearance of the family as a social
unit, and to the weakening of intelligence
and moral sense. It is destroying the remains
of culture. All forms of the proletariat must
be suppressed. Each individual should have
the security and the stability required for
the foundation of a family. Marriage must
cease being only a temporary union. The union
of man and woman, like that of the higher
anthropoids, ought to last at least until
the young have no further need of protection.
The laws relating to education, and especially
to that of girls, to marriage, and divorce
should, above all, take into account the interest
of children. Women should receive a higher
education, not in order to become doctors,
lawyers, or professors, but to rear their
offspring to be valuable human beings.
The free practice of eugenics could lead not
only to the development of stronger individuals,
but also of strains endowed with more endurance,
intelligence, and courage. These strains should
constitute an aristocracy, from which great
men would probably appear. Modern society
must promote, by all possible means, the formation
of better human stock. No financial or moral
rewards should be too great for those who,
through the wisdom of their marriage, would
engender geniuses. The complexity of our civilization
is immense. No one can master all its mechanisms.
However, these mechanisms have to be mastered.
There is need today of men of larger mental
and moral size, capable of accomplishing such
a task. The establishment of a hereditary
biological aristocracy through voluntary eugenics
would be an important step toward the solution
of our present problems.
== French Foundation for the Study of Human
Problems ==
In 1937, Carrel joined Jean Coutrot’s Centre
d’Etudes des Problèmes Humains - Coutrot’s
aim was to develop what he called an "economic
humanism" through "collective thinking." In
1941, through connections to the cabinet of
Vichy France president Philippe Pétain (specifically,
French industrial physicians André Gros and
Jacques Ménétrier) he went on to advocate
for the creation of the Fondation Française
pour l’Etude des Problèmes Humains (French
Foundation for the Study of Human Problems)
which was created by decree of the Vichy regime
in 1941, and where he served as 'regent'.The
foundation was at the origin of the October
11, 1946, law, enacted by the Provisional
Government of the French Republic (GPRF),
which institutionalized the field of occupational
medicine. It worked on demographics (Robert
Gessain, Paul Vincent, Jean Bourgeois-Pichat),
on economics, (François Perroux), on nutrition
(Jean Sutter), on habitation (Jean Merlet)
and on the first opinion polls (Jean Stoetzel).
"The foundation was chartered as a public
institution under the joint supervision of
the ministries of finance and public health.
It was given financial autonomy and a budget
of forty million francs—roughly one franc
per inhabitant—a true luxury considering
the burdens imposed by the German Occupation
on the nation’s resources. By way of comparison,
the whole Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS) was given a budget of
fifty million francs."
The Foundation made many positive accomplishments
during its time. Yet it was also behind the
origin of the December 16, 1942 Act inventing
the "prenuptial certificate", which had to
precede any marriage and was supposed, after
a biological examination, to insure the "good
health" of the spouses, in particular in regard
to sexually transmitted diseases (STD) and
"life hygiene" (sic). The institute also conceived
the "scholar book" ("livret scolaire"), which
could be used to record students' grades in
the French secondary schools, and thus classify
and select them according to scholastic performance.According
to Gwen Terrenoire, writing in Eugenics in
France (1913-1941) : a review of research
findings, "The foundation was a pluridisciplinary
centre that employed around 300 researchers
(mainly statisticians, psychologists, physicians)
from the summer of 1942 to the end of the
autumn of 1944. After the liberation of Paris,
Carrel was suspended by the Minister of Health;
he died in November 1944, but the Foundation
itself was "purged", only to reappear in a
short time as the Institut national d’études
démographiques (INED) that is still active."
Although Carrel himself was dead most members
of his team did move to the INED, which was
led by famous demographist Alfred Sauvy, who
coined the expression "Third World". Others
joined Robert Debré's "Institut national
d'hygiène" (National Hygiene Institute),
which later became the INSERM.
== In popular culture ==
Experiments with the Carrel-Dakin method were
depicted in the 2014 BBC miniseries, The Crimson
Field.
== See also ==
HeLa
== References ==
== Sources ==
Carrel, Alexis. Man, The Unknown. New York
and London: Harper and Brothers, 1939.
Szasz, Thomas. The Theology of Medicine. New
York: Syracuse University Press, 1977.
Feuerwerker, Elie. Alexis Carrel et l'eugénisme.
Le Monde, 1er Juillet 1986.
Schneider, William. Quality and Quantity:
The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century
France, Cambridge UP 1990.
Bonnafé, Lucien and Tort, Patrick. L'Homme,
cet inconnu? Alexis Carrel, Jean-Marie le
Pen et les chambres a gaz Editions Syllepse,
1996. ISBN 2-907993-14-3
David Zane Mairowitz. "Fascism à la mode:
in France, the far right presses for national
purity", Harper's Magazine; 10/1/1997
Reggiani, Andrés Horacio. Alexis Carrel,
the Unknown: Eugenics and Population Research
under Vichy French Historical Studies, Spring
2002; 25: pp. 331 - 356.
Wallace, Max. The American Axis: Henry Ford,
Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third
Reich St. Martin's Press, New York, 2003.
Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism W. W.
Norton, 2003.
Walther, Rudolph. Die seltsamen Lehren des
Doktor Carrel, DIE ZEIT, 31.07.2003 Nr. 32
Terrenoire, Gwen, CNRS. Eugenics in France
(1913-1941) : a review of research findings
Joint Programmatic Commission UNESCO-ONG Science
and Ethics, March 24, 2003 (Comité de Liaison
ONG-UNESCO)
Reggiani, Andrés Horacio. God's Eugenicist.
Alexis Carrel and the Sociobiology of Decline.
Berghahn Books, Oxford 2007.
Friedman, David M. The Immortalists: Charles
Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring
Quest to Live Forever. HarperCollins, NY 2007.
Borghi L. (2015) "Heart Matters. The Collaboration
Between Surgeons and Engineers in the Rise
of Cardiac Surgery". In: Pisano R. (eds) A
Bridge between Conceptual Frameworks. History
of Mechanism and Machine Science, vol 27.
Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 53-68
== External links ==
Nobel Prize presentation speech to Dr. Carrel
Nobel Prize biography of Dr. Carrel
Research Foundation entitled to Alexis Carrel
"Data from France". Time. 1944-10-16. Retrieved
2008-08-10. Time, October 16, 1944
Death of Alexis Carrel, Time, November 13,
1944
