Alexis Carrel
1873-1944
French Physician and Surgeon
Alexis Carrel is recognized for making advances in surgery and promoting interest in organ transplants. He received the 1912 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his development of a technique to sew blood vessels together end-to-end.
Born in Ste-Foy-les-Lyon, France, on June 28, 1873, he was the son of a silk merchant. He was interested in many subjects and received two degrees before getting his medical degree from the University of Lyons in 1900. In 1894, while in Lyons, the French president was stabbed and bled to death because there were then no procedures for repairing blood vessels. The death had a profound effect on Carrel, who sought to find ways to sew blood vessels. Using a very fine silk thread and needle, he practiced on paper to perfect the technique. He then turned to ways of keeping cells around the area alive and well. He published an account of his successes in a French medical journal in 1902, but the French establishment was not impressed.
Carrel moved briefly to Canada, then to the University of Chicago. In 1906 he joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York, where he worked to perfect his technique for suturing blood vessels. Carrel envisioned a time when blood transfusions and organ transplants would become reality. He even performedsuccessful kidney transplants on dogs. For his initiatives, he was given the 1912 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology.
In 1912 Carrel began a fascinating experiment in which he kept heart tissue from a chick embryo alive and beating by maintaining the proper nutrient culture and carefully removing waste accumulation. The monstrous heart became a media sensation, with one New York newspaper reporting each year on the "birthday" of the chick heart. The heart was maintained for 34 years, even outliving Carrel, before it was deliberately destroyed.
Although he lived in New York, he never became a United States citizen and maintained a home in France off the coast of Brittany. When World War I broke out, the French government called Carrel into service and placed him in a front line hospital. He was assisted by his wife of one year, who was a surgical nurse. Carrel worked with biochemist Henry Dakin (1880-1952) to develop a method for cleaning wounds using sodium hypochlorite. The complicated Carrel-Dakin method was very important in its time, but now has been replaced by antibiotics.
After his discharge in 1919, Carrel returned to Rockefeller Institute to continue his work with tissue cultures and began to focus on causes of cancer. He won several awards, including the Nordhoff-Jung Prize in 1931, for his study of malignant tumors.
Carrel was always fascinated with keeping organs alive outside the body. He and famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974) designed a special pump made of glass that would circulate fluids around organs and keep them viable for a period of time. Called the perfusion pump, the device laid the foundation for the future development of the heart-lung machine. Carrel and Lindbergh became good friends. They appeared together with their mechanical heart in the July 1, 1935, issue of Time magazine and published a book together called The Culture of Organs.
Carrel had many personal interests and was deeply religious. He visited Lourdes in France as a young man and made a spiritual pilgrimage there each year. He wrote several books on the topic, including Man the Unknown, which became a bestseller in 1935. Some considered his mixing of religion and science inappropriate. One such person was the new director of the Rockefeller Institute, who encouraged Carrel's "retirement" and closed the division of experimental surgery.
Alexis Carrel. (Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.)Although France had fallen to Germany, Carrel returned to his homeland in 1941 by making his way through Spain. The Germans had set up a puppet French government at Vichy. Carrel refused to serve as director of health under the new regime, but did accept a position with the Foundation for the Study of Human Problems. He brought together young intellectuals for philosophical discussions.
When the Germans were defeated in 1944, the French government accused Carrel of collaborating with the Nazis and intended to prosecute him. Shortly before the trial, Carrel had a heart attack and died in Paris on November 4, 1944. He was buried in Saint Yves Church near his home on Saint Gilder.
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