杏吧原创

THEY were an unlikely pair: one was the youngest person ever to win a Nobel prize, the other a college dropout. Alexis Carrel, a stocky French surgeon, headed up a lab at the renowned Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York; Charles Lindbergh, a tall American, had flunked out of the University of Wisconsin.

By the time they met, each was a hero. Carrel had been awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for his work on vascular suture and the transplantation of blood vessels and organs. Lindbergh had made the first solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic.

Despite all they had achieved, these men had an even greater ambition: to conquer death. But their dreams developed a dark side. They became united in their desire to find a way, through medical research, to ensure the supremacy of the white race. In The Immortalists, David M. Friedman chronicles the fascinating relationship between these strange bedfellows.

Their collaboration began innocently enough. Lindbergh visited Carrel鈥檚 lab in 1930 because his sister-in-law, Elisabeth Morrow, had a damaged heart in need of a new mitral valve. Carrel was the world leader in keeping tissue and organs alive in vitro, but he told Lindbergh he was unable to help. The heart-lung machines that would make such surgery possible, he said, were still decades away. Even his attempts to keep a mouse thyroid alive outside the body were in need of a better perfusion system to deliver oxygen and nutrients. So Lindbergh, a gifted mechanic, decided to make one.

The work that he and Carrel collaborated on between 1930 and 1939 deserves to be better known. Lindbergh succeeded in developing a perfusion pump, and together they took some of the first steps toward organ transplants. Limited by the state of biochemical and physiological knowledge at the time, however, they fell far short of their goal of keeping human organs viable for medical or surgical treatment outside the body. But the two co-authored an article in Science, 鈥淭he Culture of Whole Organs鈥�, in 1935.

鈥淭hey took the first step toward organ transplants鈥�

Unfortunately, Carrel reached his widest audience with his 1935 book Man, the Unknown, a work that advocated the creation of a ruling elite purged of intellectual and physical defects through careful breeding and medical science 鈥� and a general population purged of the 鈥渇eeble-minded鈥�, insane or criminal through euthanasia. Lindbergh fell under Carrel鈥檚 spell and imbibed a faith in eugenics that blended easily with his own provincial, small-town Minnesota racism.

In 1936, while Carrel was popularising his views on eugenics, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, landed in Berlin to embark upon a red-carpet tour of the renascent Luftwaffe. There, Lindbergh got to see and fly the latest warplanes while Anne was impressed by the 鈥渘eatness, order, trimness, and cleanliness鈥� of Berlin. This and subsequent visits led Lindbergh to a profound admiration for the Nazis, and he devoted much of the next five years trying to prevent the US from going to war with Germany.

By 1941 his 鈥淎merica First鈥� campaign had made him one of the most hated men in the US. It also led him to part company with Carrel. For all the Frenchman鈥檚 conviction of the superiority of white Europeans, Carrel was a patriot who had served as a medic in the first world war: he despised 鈥渢he Boches鈥� and had no sympathy for Nazism.

As for achieving immortality, Lindbergh lives on today as an admired yet hated figure. Carrel, on the other hand, is little remembered outside his field, though his influence can be glimpsed in Lindbergh鈥檚 legend. But was Carrel really the catalyst for Lindbergh鈥檚 moral downfall, as the book portrays? Probably not. Lindbergh was a narrow-minded anti-Semite who hated mass democracy before he met the great surgeon, and there is no evidence that Carrel鈥檚 eugenic theories led him to be enthralled by Nazi Germany. He appreciated authoritarianism on his own.

Friedman also glosses over Carrel鈥檚 unattractive political life in pre-war and Vichy France, perhaps because he assumes readers will be more interested in Lindbergh. Still, he has written a scientifically literate, engrossing tale of the toxic combination of brilliance and arrogance, and all the consequences that come with it.