Charles
Lindbergh and the Heart Pump
After Charles A. Lindbergh
had flown solo across the Atlantic, he had a ticker-tape parade through
New York. No
pun is intended on the word 'ticker', except that the hearts of people
in America and all around the world did go out to the brave young pilot
and his little plane.
People tend to know
the story of that flight, and they also know about Lindbergh that his
baby son was kidnapped and killed, and that a German by the name of Hauptmann
was blamed for that terrible deed, even though many firmly state now that
Hauptmann was framed by police eager for a conviction in so public a case.
And talking about a German fairly soon leads people to talk about Lindbergh's
Nazi sympathies which swiftly lost him the huge following he had so suddenly
gained.
But there is also
a story of an invention by Lindbergh, and it make something of a companion
piece to the tale of Hedy Lamarr's patent, except of course that
there is a more direct connection between Lindbergh and technology. He
would have had to know something about machines in order to fly an aeroplane
in those days. Indeed Lindbergh had made important contributions to the
design of The Spirit of St. Louis as the aircraft was called. It
certainly worked; it took him to France.
And within a few short
years, 'Lindy' was back in France, in fact he was back in Lyons, where
he had landed on the greatest day in his life.
Some years before
a relative of Lindbergh's had suffered heart trouble. Doctors couldn't
operate without stopping the heart, but that would have killed the patient
. That struck Lindbergh as a solvable problem, and he hoped the time would
come when he would be able to address it.
In 1935, after enduring
a three-year ordeal involving the kidnapping and murder of their first
born son and the trial of the man accused of committing the crime, Charles
and Anne Morrow Lindbergh chose to flee the country that had made them
national icons. Charles, whose battles with the media over issues of privacy
were long-standing, confided to a friend that, "We Americans are a primitive
people. ...Americans seem to have little respect for the law or the rights
of others." The Lindberghs found sanctuary in the English countryside.
But two years later, they moved again, this time to a tiny island off
the northwest coast of France. One reason for their choice of locales
was so Charles could work more closely with a certain Nobel prize-winning
scientist.
Alexis Carrel had
won world-wide acclaim for his work in organ transplants and suturing
blood vessels. Carrel was highly respected, but he was odd. His operating
room was solid black. So were the gowns that people had to wear in the
operating theatre. Author Christopher Hallowell tells us that Carrel "flirted
with arcane mysticism" and that he harbored bizzare racial theories. But
then, so did Lindbergh. The two men liked each other immensely.
Carrel soon askied
if an external blood pump could sustain a patient's body while an operation
on the heart continued. Lindbergh studied the problem and quietly went
back to the united States and to a Princeton University glass blower.
Two weeks later he came back with his own blood pump. Carrel was delighted
and invited Lindbergh to continue work in his laboratory. Lindbergh did.
He produced a series of pumps that didn't quite work.
In 1935, he finally
produced a working blood pump. He also produced a lot of the supporting
technology. He'd made a centrifuge to
separate blood plasma without damaging it. Carrel sang the praises of
the work. Lindbergh was on the cover of a 1938 Time magazine with his
invention. The press wrote about transplants and implants and the medical
miracles right around the corner. Maybe the pump itself could be miniaturized
and used to replace the human heart?
The terrible ordeal
Lindbergh had been through with the kidnapping of his baby had happened
three years before. Also, photographs of Lindbergh at the Berlin Olympics
and receiving honours from the Nazis had made millions of people drop
him as their hero.
Then World War II
began, Lindbergh, the Nazi-sympathiser who had declared that Hitler would
win the War, actually flew combat missions for the Allies in the Pacific.
Most of the pumps Lindbergh and carel made were were broken up for the
platinum in them.
Carrel died shortly
after the war. he had been accused of working for the pro-Nazi Vichy Government.
The cause of death was, of all things, a heart attack.
In
the 1960's, Lindbergh found himself back in biomedical science -- at the
Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, redesigning its
organ perfusion system. The Navy had established a cryobiological-perfusion
research program with the objective of 'creating a storage bank of human
organs for transplantation', another idea dismissed as 'impossible' a
generation earlier.
Lindbergh
died in 1974 just as the world was being introduced to recombinant DNA
technology. He missed the 'dawn of biotech.'
He also missed the
boat, in the end. Lindbergh declared that science 'clarifies man's vision
beyond his birth and death and links him to universality. Unfortunately
the abiding and wide-spread vision of Charles A. Lindbergh is not that
of a hero beside a plane, or a farsighted inventor, but a blind young
man letting down humanity, his country and himself by wearing the insignia
and decorations of the monstrous Nazi regime.
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