The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr Alexis Carrel and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever
by David M Friedman
JR Books, £17.99
MOST people know two things about Charles Lindbergh. One: in 1927 he became the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. And two: five years later his baby son was kidnapped and murdered.
The first event made him the most famous man on the planet, the prototype celebrity of the mass media age, a victim of ticker-tape parades, celebrity tours and the flashbulb’s glare. The second reignited that hysteria, but subtly changed the tone. After the murder, Lindbergh’s heroic status was stained with darkness and suspicion. Some crazies even accused the bereaved couple of killing their own child (thus grotesquely foreshadowing the case of Madeleine McCann).
In The Immortalists, David Friedman uncovers a third, far less well-known – and far weirder – episode in Lindbergh’s life. The airman’s meeting with Dr Alexis Carrel set him on a bizarre journey which took him, by way of vivisection labs and right-wing think tanks, to Nazi Germany and public ridicule. It was fuelled by a single obsession – the search for eternal life.
Carrel was a surgeon of genius who had pioneered the use of grafts and transplants during the Great War. Back in 1912, he had taken tissue from a baby chick’s heart and kept it alive in a special “culture flask”. This was still on display – and still living – when Lindbergh visited Carrel’s laboratories in 1930.
Carrel believed the same could be done for an entire organ, even a severed human head. Body parts could be removed, re-grown and re-attached. Unhealthy or failing bits could be replaced by better bits off the shelf. His vision opened the door to transplant surgery, stem cell research and other modern medical marvels.
But Carrel vaulted far beyond such practical aims, landing himself in the fantasy world of Frankenstein, Davros and Doctor Moreau. If you could replace organs, he reasoned, why should anyone have to die? Eternal life was, he reckoned, within the human grasp.
Lindbergh followed eagerly. He designed pumps and flasks to keep the bodiless hearts going. He swallowed the theory with all its awful implications (the building of a superior race, the suppression of those supposedly inferior) and, before you could say Anschluss, there he was in Germany shaking hands with Hermann Goering.
From here, as you can imagine, the whole story goes eye-poppingly bonkers but Friedman tells it with great gusto and a light hand on the technical details.
Andrew Langley
