Carrel's Man

(See front cover)

Not one of the 22 great medical scientists who are members of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Manhattan has a reputation with the man-in-the-street equal to that of a minor volunteer worker at the Institute named Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Familiar only to the small scientific circle is the mighty attack of Dr. Florence Sabin upon the germ of tuberculosis. Every cancer specialist is aware of Rous's sarcoma but outside the Institute's walls Dr. Peyton Rous is a personal unknown. It took a Nobel Prize in 1930 and the recent use of his blood analysis in bastardy cases to put Dr. Karl Landsteiner into the lay Press. Long ago Dr. Alexis Carrel had some small renown as the man who had found a way to keep a piece of chicken heart living and growing through the years. Lately the name of Carrel has been whirled up to fresh fame because Bio-mechanic Lindbergh designed him an artificial heart with which to pump life into human hearts, kidneys, thyroids, ovaries and because the Press knew the newsworthiness of the name of Lindbergh, if not of Carrel (TIME, July 1).

Last week Dr. Carrel was, as usual, vacationing in a chateau near Lyons in his native France. And, as usual, what the Press wanted to hear him talk about was his famed assistant at the Institute. The small, bald, 62-year-old scientist duly obliged: "Lindbergh is considered . . . exclusively as a flyer . . . but he is much more than that. He is a great savant. Men who achieve such things are capable of accomplishments in all domains."

Facts & Feats. Despite popular impressions, Dr. Carrel is not the tail of the Lindbergh kite. He has had a fine full career of his own, which, had it been in politics or retail merchandising or baseball, instead of scientific research, would have made him a familiar character to newsreaders from coast to coast. After looking back on that career for more than a year, Dr. Carrel this week published a book into which he packed the essence of his experiences, philosophy and intuition as a doctor and as a man. He called it Man, the Unknown.* Its theme is that Science has itemized most of the facts of mankind but has never added them up into the total of man's huge potentialities.

The observations of man and life which he put into Man, the Unknown began when Alexis Carrel, son of a silk merchant, was a medical student at the University of Lyons. There he acquired surgical dexterity by tying two pieces of catgut with his index and middle fingers inside a small cardboard box so securely that no one could untie them with two hands. He also achieved the feat of sewing 500 stitches into a single sheet of cigaret paper. Shortly after graduation he did two surgical tricks that brought him quick professional reputation. He devised the most successful way of sewing the cut ends of an artery together: put draw strings through each end of the artery: pull until the circular edges acquire a triangular shape; bend the flaps outward; put the two triangles together; hem the fringe of flaps together. The inside of the artery is now smooth; hence no blood clot will form there.

The other feat was to remove a dog's goitre and put it back upside down. The reversed thyroid functioned well; the dog lived. Dr. Carrel received a call to McGill University. Soon he moved on to the University of Chicago where he, with Dr. Charles Claude Guthrie, perfected the technique of transferring kidneys, ovaries, thyroids, legs from one dog to another. Upon that accomplishment Dr. Carrel sailed into the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan in 1906. Six years later the first Nobel Prize ever awarded to a U. S. doctor of medicine went to Alexis Carrel for his suturing of blood vessels and transplantation of organs.

Heart. At Rockefeller Institute Dr. Carrel, with Dr. Montrose Thomas Burrows, elaborating methods developed by Yale's Dr. Ross Granville Harrison, duplicated the blood of a chicken so successfully that the famed piece of unborn chicken's heart began to grow & grow. If in the 23 years since that experiment started his assistants had not periodically pared the embryonic tissue and destroyed the parings, the whole earth might now (theoretically) be covered with a film of soft flesh.

His imagination aflame with success, Dr. Carrel told a convention of the American Medical Association: "I found that permanent life outside the organism was possible. . . . The tissues actually used in human surgery, as cartilage, periosteum, skin, and aponeuroses, could easily be taken in large quantities from the fresh cadavers of fetuses and infants and preserved in vaseline and in cold storage. A supply of tissues in latent life would be constantly ready for use, and the tubes containing the tissues could even be sent in small refrigerators of the type of the thermos bottle to surgeons who need them."

That prediction came true only two years ago when Dr. Harvey Brinton Stone of Johns Hopkins transplanted thyroid tissue from one patient to another. Theretofore all tissue transplants either invalided the patient or died after doing only temporary good. Dr. Stone succeeded because he first soaked the thyroid tissue in serum from the blood of the patient who was to receive it (TIME. Dec. 18, 1933). By doing that Dr. Stone followed fundamental procedures developed by Dr. Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute.

Wife & War. Dr. Carrel has determined, he declares in Man, the Unknown; that women should not make excessive sexual demands upon men of genius. He waited until he was 40 before he married Anne de la Motte de la Mairie, widow of the Marquis de la Mairie--a large, handsome woman.

Dr. Carrel who long wanted to be a soldier and once talked of going to South America to start a revolution and become a dictator, rushed into the French Army as a lieutenant at the outbreak of War. He won the Legion of Honor, soon became a major. John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave him a hospital at Compiegne. There with Research Chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin he perfected the famed Carrel-Dakin antiseptic solution for the treatment of infected wounds. Mrs. Carrel drove an ambulance close behind the front.

War was only one item in the long education of Alexis Carrel. Science had taught him what human beings are and. with that knowledge, he felt that he had been exalted into a mystical invisible ruling class--a class which, if given the worldly power to match its intellectual prestige, might bring humanity to its full flower. Therefore in his Man, the Unknown Dr. Carrel solemnly proposes a High Council of Doctors to rule the world for its own good.

Council of Doctors. The active Carrel imagination envisages a ''thinking centre'' patterned on the U. S. Supreme Court to which the political leaders of the world would come for their orders. Candidates for this omnipotent body would start studying for the job at 25, would not be eligible for membership before they were 50. Dr. Carrel describes his Council's operation thus:

"The members . . . would be free from research and teaching. They would deliver no addresses. They would dedicate their lives to the contemplation of the economic, sociological, psychological, physiological and pathological phenomena manifested by the civilized nations and their constitutive individuals. And to that of the development of Science and of the influence of its applications to our habits of life and of thought. They would endeavor to discover how modern civilization could mold itself to man without crushing any of his essential qualities. Their silent meditation would protect the inhabitants of the new city from the mechanical inventions which are dangerous for their body or their mind, from the adulteration of thought as well as food, from the whims of the specialists in education, nutrition, morals, sociology, etc., from all progress inspired, not by the needs of the public, but by the greed or the illusions of their inventors. An institution of this sort would acquire enough knowledge to prevent the organic and mental deterioration of civilized nations. Its members should be given a position as highly considered, as free from political intrigues and from cheap publicity, as that of the justices of the Supreme Court. Their importance would, in truth, be much greater than that of the jurists who watch over the Constitution. For they would be the defenders of the body and the soul of a great race in its tragic struggle against the blind sciences of matter."

Dr. Carrel hints that he would make a good member of such a High Council. Writing of himself in the third person he says: "He has observed practically every form of human activity. He is acquainted with the poor and the rich, the sound and the diseased, the learned and the ignorant, the weak-minded, the insane, the shrewd, the criminal, etc. . . . farmers, proletarians, clerks, shopkeepers, financiers, manufacturers, politicians, statesmen, soldiers, professors, schoolteachers, clergymen, peasants, bourgeois, and aristocrats. The circumstances of his life have led him across the path of philosophers, artists, poets, and scientists. And also of geniuses, heroes, and saints. At the same time, he has studied the hidden mechanisms which, in the depth of the tissues and in the immensity of the brain, are the substratum of organic and mental phenomena."

Democratic Error. As a High Councilor, Dr. Carrel would promptly correct ''an error'' concerning democratic equality. Says he: "This dogma is now breaking down under the blows of the experience of the nations. It is, therefore, unnecessary to insist upon its falseness. But its success has been astonishingly long. How could humanity accept such faith for so many years? The democratic creed does not take account of the constitution of our body and of our consciousness. It does not apply to the concrete fact which the individual is. Indeed, human beings are equal. But individuals are not. The equality of their rights is an illusion. The feeble-minded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law. The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education. It is absurd to give them the same electoral power as the fully developed individuals."

In his mighty flight of fancy Dr. Carrel does not pause to explain to men of lesser minds just how, as a practical political matter, these titanic reforms are to be brought about. Nor does he adduce any historic arguments to prove that doctors make great governors of men, perhaps because such arguments are difficult to find. U. S. experience with doctors in high office (e. g. New York's Senator Royal S. Copeland and Representative William Irving Sirovich) Dr. Carrel apparently realized would not help him make his point.

Dr. Carrel is a great scientist, an avid mystic who knows no intellectual bonds. He is, besides, a sly mocker who delights in wild rant. Whether his thesis of iatrocracy was meant to be a colossal joke with which to fool members of his profession or whether he offered it in all earnestness with the idea that it would add to his stature as a world thinker he alone knew last week.

* Harpers ($3.50).

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