The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever

By David M. Friedman

Book Overview

He was one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of best-selling biographies and a hit movie, as well as the inspiration for a dance step - the Lindy Hop - he himself was too shy to try. But for all the attention lavished on Charles Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. Together this oddest of couples - one a brilliant surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies - embarked on a secret quest to achieve immortality. Their endeavor began on November 28, 1930, in Carrel's laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, a haven created by the world's richest man, John D. Rockefeller, so that medical investigators could pursue their wildest dreams, freed from the demands of clinical practice. For Carrel, who won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for pioneering organ transplants, that dream was conquering death. But not for everyone - only a special few. In one of his more ghoulish experiments, Carrel removed the heart from a chick embryo and placed it in a glass jar, where, with special cleansing and feeding, he kept it alive, with no signs of aging, far beyond the species' natural life span. That result, Carrel believed, suggested that natural death wasn't inevitable. But to attempt such a test with humans, Carrel needed a mechanical genius to create a device in which severed human organs could live and function indefin-itely. Might that genius be the handsome pilot who astonished the world in May 1927 by flying alone across the Atlantic - a feat even most pilots had thought impos-sible - in a single-engine airplane he designed himself? Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Mad-man, and all true, The Immortalists is the remarkable story of how two men of prodigious achievement, and equally large character flaws, challenged nature's oldest rule, with consequences - personal, professional, and political - neither man anticipated.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006052815X
• ISBN13: 9780060528157
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Ecco
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.1" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

An excellent book, but keep it in perspective.

The first half of this book is superb in detailing the development of the organ perfusion pump and related scientific breakthroughs made by Dr. Carrel and Mr. Lindbergh in the 1930s. In this part, Mr. Friedman relies mostly on his own research. The second half describes the sad fate of Mr Carrel, who was unfairly accused of collaboration, and the unique fate of Mr Lindbergh, who was demonized during the neutrality debate...

America's Faulty Hero

Careful textbooks in my home state, Minnesota, portray Charles Lindbergh as an "isolationist" opponent to US participation in World War II. After all, he was a hero - OUR hero - a Swedish American from our state. Author David Friedman, with quite thorough evidence, portrays Lindbergh differently, as an admirer of Hitler and Hitler's Germany, who wrote to his American friend that Hitler "is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe...

A clear look at the time Lindbergh and Carrel worked together on organ transplantation

This book centers on the period of Charles Lindbergh's life when he was working with Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Carrel had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912 for his work on suturing blood vessels. He had also been lauded for his method of disinfecting wounds with chlorine (this was decades prior to the development and use of antibiotics). They were both famous men and, when...

Brilliant analysis of two brilliant minds (perhaps three)

Never having read a real biography of Lindberg, and never having heard of Alexis Carrel, this book introduced me to a new universe of thought. Friedman is empathetic and compassionate when he describes the tragic (as in Greek tragedy, a flaw that dooms greatness) shortcomings of men he obviously very much admires. Carrel and Lindberg thought of themselves, with some justification, as Olympians. Carrel didn't suffer fools...

Great...but how does he know?

I enjoyed this book a lot, having learned much more about Lindbergh than I ever knew, especially his apparent eventual repudiation of eugenics and the Nazis and his new-found commitment to environmentalism. But how does Friedman know about all the thoughts Lindbergh had as he reassesses his values in light of particular experiences? The notes at the back, which provide references for particular lines of many pages, in many...