Physical Immortality

Professor Arthur G. Green, English scientist, sailed home last week from Manhattan, and his excitement was so great that he could not keep from talking with a ship-news reporter. He had seen Dr. Alexis Carrel (Nobel Prize Winner in 1912), and he had seen a piece of tissue from the heart of a chicken which Dr. Carrel cut from a live bird in 1913. The tissue is still alive and growing. Motion pictures have been taken of its processes of development.

Professor Green exclaimed:

"Dr. Carrel introduces immortality in a physical sense. It is there before your eyes, and so long as this tissue is nurtured and irrigated it will live. It cannot die. Its growth is so enormous that it doubles itself every twenty-four hours and if it had not been pared down each day since the experiment began it would now be a colossal monster overspreading all New York."

Cell-immortality is not a new demonstration. It has already been demonstrated that one-celled animals can live indefinitely. But from single-celled animals there is a wide gap. Dr. Carrel's chickenheart-tissue is not a chicken. It is in effect a group of single cells living individually in an ideal environment without mutual interdependence. The real importance of the experiment is that it may furnish important information on the processes of tissue growth.