AFTER CHARLES LINDBERGH FLEW across the Atlantic Ocean alone in 1927, he became such a celebrity that when he developed an interest in the possibility of organ replacement three years later, he was invited to the Rockefeller Institute to work with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel laureate eminent in the field of cell culture. Forty years later Colonel Lindbergh told Dr. Clarence Dennis how he had started thinking about medical engineering: His wife’s sister had a serious cardiac condition, one that her doctors claimed they could correct if only heart surgery were possible. It wasn’t possible, though, because, as they explained to Lindbergh, so much blood gushed around the heart cavity that surgeons couldn’t hope to see what they were doing. Dr. Dennis, himself a pioneer in the development of the heart-lung machine in the early 1950s, credited Lindbergh as the first person to think seriously about ways to temporarily replace the function of the heart and lung, so as to drain the heart cavity for surgery. And so with Charles Lindbergh, of all people, begins the story of the development of artificial organs.

For all the prestige of Dr. Carrel’s laboratory, however, Lindbergh might have been better off somewhere else in the long run. Carrel, a Frenchman, had pioneered kidney transplants, and his ultimate dream was to maintain an inventory of living organs away from the body, ready for transplant. In 1936 Carrel and Lindbergh demonstrated an interesting piece of apparatus at a conference in Copenhagen. Called an artificial heart by the popular press, it was actually just a very early step toward such a thing. In the first place, it was designed only to keep one isolated organ (a thyroid, for example) supplied with enough blood and oxygen to maintain its vitality. In the second place, Dr. Carrel did not recognize that an anticlotting element is crucial to any artificial organ. Far more damaging to the research, though, was the fact that Dr. Carrel’s influence over Charles Lindbergh soon expanded past medical matters, into openly anti-American theories regarding the superiority of Nordic races and the doom of America’s mingled nationalities. Within a year or two Lindbergh’s public activities in espousing similar views apparently interested him more than any start he had made in medical research, which he set aside for good.

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