Charles Lindbergh, Lab Rat

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Lindbergh Spiritual Crisis

1:00In 1928, Charles Lindbergh had a spiritual crisis. One day while flying over Utah, he landed his plane in the desert. He decided to camp there rather than face the packs of reporters who would hound him if he rented a hotel room. While lying in the sand, staring up at the stars, he thought, What am I doing with my life? A year earlier, at age 25, Lindbergh had completed the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

1:32He instantly became the most famous man on Earth. Four million people attended his ticker tape parade in New York. Then, on a national tour, 30 million more Americans attended lectures he gave. And Lindbergh hated every second of it. He had not started flying to become a celebrity. Rather, he just loved tinkering with machines. He often referred to his flights as scientific experiments. So that night in Utah, he made a decision. He had wanted to be a doctor as a child, but struggled in school and flunked out of college.

2:06Now, he would return to his first love and try medical research to help people. This decision involved more than just personal fulfillment. Lindbergh's wife had a sister named Elizabeth who had contracted rheumatic fever during childhood. The disease damaged her heart, which could barely pump blood afterward. Every year, she got weaker. So, Lindbergh decided to try and save her. He would build a mechanical heart, a cardiac pump. It seemed simple enough.

2:38He had no idea what dark alleys this project would lead him down, including a quest to make human beings immortal.

2:52This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Keen, a topsy-turvy, sciency history podcast where footnotes become the real story.

3:05After that night in the desert, Charles Lindbergh started asking doctors he knew for advice. Who could he consult about building a mechanical heart? He eventually heard about a 57-year-old surgeon in Manhattan who was doing pioneering research on organ transplants. Lindbergh hesitated. He lived in nearby New Jersey, but he hated visiting New York City. Someone there was always screaming his name or snapping a picture or even pawing at him.

3:38But his sister-in-law Elizabeth's life was at stake. So he donned a disguise, a fedora, and fake glasses and drove over from New Jersey.

Meeting Alexis Carell

3:47The surgeon he visited was Alexis Carell at the Rockefeller Institute. Carell was bald, chesty, and short. He wore tiny glasses and had one brown and one blue eye. Carell had been born in France, but he got blackballed from the scientific community there for his belief in the healing power of prayer and miracles. He once tried raising the dead, attempting to resurrect a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy. For some strange reason, he also believed that eating white bread lowered people's IQs

4:20and that tall men could never be true geniuses. People tolerated these quirks because of Carell's brilliance. Around 1900, he invented a technique that allowed surgeons to reattach blood vessels. Far more patients suddenly survived operations. One historian described the impact of this technique on surgery as second in importance only to anesthesia. In 1912, at age 39, Carell won the Nobel Prize, the youngest ever laureate at that time.

4:52Then, while serving as a frontline doctor in World War I, he discovered the first antiseptic that killed germs without destroying the surrounding tissue. This discovery saved millions more lives, and it made Carell a celebrity beyond science. In later years, the likes of Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill visited his lab. As did Charles Lindbergh. When Lindbergh arrived, the 5'3'' surgeon marched right up and got within an inch of the 6'3'' pilot's face.

5:23Then he started studying Lindbergh's features with his differently colored eyes. Carell believed in physiognomy, the fake science of divining people's characters based on their looks, like palm reading for your face. Lindbergh was startled, but apparently Carell liked what he saw. The surgeon smiled and showed Lindbergh a chair. Lindbergh explained about his sister-in-law's failing heart and his hope to replace it with an artificial pump. Carell smiled gently and said the idea was doomed.

5:54A mechanical cardiac pump would require a piston, which would smash delicate red blood cells. Corrosion and clotting seemed likely, too. Plus, surgeons could not just stop Elizabeth's heart while installing the pump. She would die from lack of blood flow in minutes. The news crushed Lindbergh, but Carell told him not to fret. He said, there might be another way. Carell explained his latest research on something called perfusion. Perfusion means forcing fluid through tissue.

6:27Carell wanted to build a perfusion machine that could keep organs alive outside the human body. Surgeons could then repair the organs externally and replace them in a patient. A perfusion machine could also substitute for a heart. That is, it could pump blood through a person's body while a surgeon repaired the heart externally. Carell mentioned that he had been running some experiments to perfuse the glands of chickens, cats, and dogs. Did Lindbergh want to see it? Boy, did he. Lindbergh practically jumped out of his seat.

6:58On the way to his lab, Carell explained that the glands sat inside a glass chamber. A jar, basically. The machine then pumped pink artificial blood through the organs. A mix of salts, nutrients, and water. Unfortunately, every experiment so far had failed. The glands in the jars always got infected. When they reached the lab, the sight of the perfusion machine shocked Lindbergh. To be blunt, it was a piece of crap. Carell might as well have built it from tin cans and chicken wire.

7:30Couldn't a Nobel Prize winner do better? Lindbergh examined the machine and quickly diagnosed the reason for the infections. The device had a pump, and bacteria were likely entering through the air intake valve. He asked Carell if he could try designing a better machine. Carell was amused. Sure, he said. Good luck, Mr. Famous Pilot. But Carell did not know that Lindbergh was a gifted engineer. That's why six other pilots died trying to cross the Atlantic before Lindbergh succeeded.

8:01They had had crude flying contraptions. Lindbergh engineered a real airplane. After seeing Carell's lab, Lindbergh donned his fake eyeglasses and fedora, sped straight home, and got to work. Just two weeks later, he returned and knocked on Carell's office door. Here it is, he said, a superior perfusion machine. Lindbergh explained how it worked. Rather than use a pump, this machine contained a spiral glass tube with a reservoir of serum at the bottom. A motor rotated the tube, which caused the liquid to slosh upward, similar to an Archimedes screw.

8:37When the serum reached the top of the spiral, it drained into a thin vertical pipe connected to an organ. Gravity pulled the fluid down through the organ and thereby nourished the tissue. The fluid then dripped down into the reservoir at the bottom, at which point the cycle started over. Voila. Perfusion. Carell was stunned. How had Lindbergh done this in two weeks? But he agreed to try the device. They decided to pump serum through a disconnected artery to see if they could keep the vessel's

9:08cells alive without infection. And it worked brilliantly. The glass spiral and reservoir were sterile and sealed off, so no bacteria could enter. The artery lived for weeks, totally infection-free. Lindbergh published a paper on the device in the prestigious journal Science, but he did so anonymously. Most researchers would kill to get a paper in Science. They would never leave their names off. But Lindbergh did not want his celebrity to distract from the machine.

9:39However promising, Lindbergh's device had one shortcoming. Gravity is a weak force. Driving serum through an organ or a human body would require much higher pressures. But he was determined to lick this problem and save his sister-in-law. Carell gave Lindbergh a lab bench and a key and told him to have at it. He regretted he couldn't pay him, but Lindbergh didn't care. The most famous man on Earth essentially became an intern. Lindbergh spent the next several years tinkering.

10:10Whenever he needed a break, Carell would invite him into his office, where they had wide-ranging discussions about politics and Western civilization. The two grew very close, somewhere between best friends and father-son. And Lindbergh came to rely on Carell emotionally, because Lindbergh suffered cruelly during those years. In 1932, his 20-month-old son was kidnapped and murdered. The press attention was suffocating. The trial of the kidnapper in 1934 was equally gut-wrenching.

10:42Meanwhile, his sister-in-law was sinking fast. Elizabeth's heart grew so weak that she could not undergo surgery to have a tooth removed. Doctors feared she would not wake up afterward. She had to ask her doctor for permission to make love to her husband. Eventually, she could not even walk around her garden without help. In November 1934, she underwent an emergency appendectomy. The incision got infected, and she died the next month, just 30 years old.

11:12During all this heartache, Carell encouraged Lindbergh to keep toiling in the lab. He thought that hard work would keep Lindbergh's mind off his troubles. And it worked. Lindbergh later said that doing research after his son's death saved his sanity. By 1935, Lindbergh had designed a new perfusion machine. He had reverted to using an air pump, but he filtered the incoming air through sterilized cotton to keep bacteria out. Using a pump allowed him to drive fluid through organs with more force.

11:43The machine made a soft swishing sound when it operated. And it worked quite well. Carell placed all sorts of animal organs in it. Hearts, livers, lymph nodes, spleens. They all thrived. An ovary in the machine even started ovulating outside the body. Collectively, over the next few years, they kept those organs alive for 100,000 hours. This was a huge deal. Scientists had been trying to keep organs alive in jars for a century by then.

12:14And of all people, Charles Lindbergh did it. This time, Carell insisted that Lindbergh talk to reporters about the research. The two appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Some of the press coverage was garbled. A few outlets reported that Lindbergh had built an artificial heart to implant in his own chest. But overall, Lindbergh felt gratified with the press for once. He had always resented the nickname that he had been given after his transatlantic flight. Lucky Lindy. To him, luck had nothing to do with it.

12:46He had engineered his way to success. But this time, with the perfusion machine, no one could call him merely lucky. His device could save millions of lives. And in truth, Carell and Lindbergh were already thinking bigger. They dreamed that the machine could keep people alive indefinitely by allowing surgeons to remove ailing organs, fix them up, and stitch them back into place. People would be immortal. But Carell and Lindbergh did not envision making everyone immortal. They wanted to reserve this privilege for one group.

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16:47Again, Carell and Lindbergh often held long discussions, especially on two topics.

Eugenics Discussions

16:53One was eugenics, the discredited practice of trying to breed superior humans. Carell and Lindbergh were both firm believers. They also discussed the supposed decline of Western civilization. They equated Western Civ with the white race, and they worried that Asian and Russian and African people would overwhelm the world and destroy European culture. That's why the perfusion pump excited them. They could keep elite white people alive longer and combat other cultures. It was dark stuff.

17:24And that was not all. In the mid-1930s, Lindbergh began praising Nazi Germany in speeches. He toured German military bases and lunched with Hermann Goering, the head of the Nazi Air Force. Lindbergh even accepted a medal from Goering. Now, Lindbergh did criticize Germany on some grounds. He considered Adolf Hitler a fanatic, and he realized that the Nazis were suppressing the rights of minorities. Nevertheless, Lindbergh commended the Nazis overall. He saw them as vigorous and manly, and declared that they alone could save Western civilization.

17:59Before long, Lindbergh all but quit his lab research to focus on making pro-Germany speeches. He also met with politicians and generals to impress his views upon them. He told them that they should let the Nazis conquer Europe. He said the Nazi military was invincible. Plus, he hated the thought of white people slaughtering each other. He wanted Europeans to unite instead, under German rule, and prepare for a race war with Russia, China, and Japan. Now, some Americans did support Lindbergh's views, but most were horrified.

18:32Just surrender to the Nazis? Libraries pulled books about him from their shelves. Airlines dropped him as their spokesman. Cabinet secretaries called him a stooge. One U.S. senator said that he was not surprised to learn that Lindbergh did research on replacing human organs with machines. He said that Lindbergh seemed not to have a real heart himself. Lindbergh was baffled at this reaction. The public adored him. How could they turn against him like this? He once disguised himself and snuck into a movie theater to watch a newsreel of a pro-German

19:05speech he had given. He was shocked to hear the audience hiss when he appeared on screen. Lindbergh's views on Germany caused a serious argument with Alexis Carell. Again, Carell had been a battlefield surgeon in France during World War I and considered the Germans barbarians. And while he agreed with Lindbergh that Western civilization was in danger, he thought that Germany would only accelerate the destruction. Carell begged Lindbergh to drop the politics and keep working on perfusion machines to make white people immortal.

19:36He thought that offered the best path forward. But Lindbergh refused. In 1939, the Rockefeller Institute forced Carell to retire, ostensibly because he had hit a mandatory retirement age, but really because of his enthusiasm for spiritual woo-woo and eugenics. Then World War II broke out. Carell moved to an island off France. He continued to criticize the Nazis there, but he did admire one part of the Third Reich, its unflinching support of eugenics.

20:06In fact, Carell helped pass a eugenics law in Vichy, France in 1942, an act of stunning callousness. In late 1944, Carell suffered a heart attack. He succumbed to pneumonia a month later. Charles Lindbergh read about his death in the newspaper and was shocked. In the 1930s, Carell and Lindbergh had been inseparable. Even when Carell spent summers abroad, he and Lindbergh would exchange up to five letters per week. But by 1944, they had not exchanged a single letter in years.

20:37How had he grown so distant from his friend, his father figure?

Lindbergh Reflections

20:43Carell's death and the exposure of Nazi atrocities after the war inaugurated a period of reflection for Lindbergh. And to be fair, he eventually renounced white supremacy and admitted that he had been a fool for supporting the Nazis. Now, that's probably too little too late, but he did genuinely repent. Between Carell's death and Lindbergh's forays into politics, the project to make human beings immortal died of neglect. Honestly, it was probably doomed anyway. Despite their success in keeping organs alive outside the body, the organ's nerve tissue always

21:18died, which meant that they could not have replaced an organ inside a patient after fixing it externally. Plus, you still have to fix the organ somehow. Carell was always vague on how he would do that, but it's not an incidental step. Even today, doctors would not know how to do that in most cases. Still, Lindbergh and Carell's research proved important overall. Today, perfusion machines keep people alive during open-heart surgery. And from Lindbergh and Carell's work, scientists learned an immense amount about keeping organs

21:49alive in general, a basic requirement for organ transplant surgery. If you would like to hear more about the future of transplants, I have put together a bonus episode at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. Scientists can even transplant genetically engineered pig organs into humans now. It's exciting and creepy all at once. The story also details why eating bacon might doom the success of such transplants, as well as the vital role that cocaine plays in modern transplant surgery.

22:20All that at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. In the end, Charles Lindbergh never built the mechanical cardiac pump that he had once envisioned. But the millions of people whose lives his science helped save can still take solace, take heart, that his research did a lot of good. This is the Disappearing Spoon Podcast. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a five-star review, or tell friends and family.

22:55Reviews, subscriptions, and word of mouth really do help. Also, please support the show at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. It costs as little as seven cents per day for ad-free shows. You can also get bonus episodes and signed books. You can find more incredible stories in my books. Check out samkeen.com. You can also inquire about booking me as a speaker at your school or event. This episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Sam Keen.

23:25Thanks for listening.

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