The Immortalists

by Friedman, David M.

• ISBN13: 9780060528157
• ISBN10: 006052815X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-01
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

He was one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of bestselling 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 indefinitely. 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 impossible in a singleengine airplane he designed himself? Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Madman, 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.

Table of Contents

I Will Show You What I'm Doing Here	p. 1
If Man Could Learn to Fly	p. 17
A Student Who May Amount to Something	p. 25
Isn't He in the Crib?	p. 41
The Chamber of Life	p. 54
Every Act of His Is Not a Fluke	p. 75
Men of Genius Are Not Tall	p. 86
A Tiny Puff of Smoke	p. 95
The Most Interesting Place in the World Today	p. 103
The Exploration of This Realm Is a Great New Adventure	p. 118
The Reaction of a Man Would Probably Be Similar	p. 128
Two Men Sitting on Two Rocks	p. 137
By Order of the Fuhrer	p. 151
I'll Take a Rain Check	p. 157
Not Merely a Schoolboy Hero, but a Schoolboy	p. 171
For We All Know What Awaits Us	p. 177
There Is Much I Do Not Like That Is Happening in the World	p. 186
The Tissues, the Blood, and the Mind of Man	p. 201
The World Was Never Clearer	p. 220
The Grandeur of His Life	p. 233
I Felt the Godlike Power	p. 247
Only by Dying	p. 258
No, Science Has Abandoned Me	p. 270
Epilogue: All of Us Are Following	p. 283
Acknowledgments	p. 285
Notes	p. 287
Index	p. 321
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

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

Chapter One

I Will Show You What I'm Doing Here

Charles Lindbergh's familiarity with prying gazes began on May 21, 1927, the day he became the most famous man in the world. That status was conferred on the unsuspecting twenty-five-year-old, literally overnight, when he was the first aviator to fly without stopping from New York to Paris, a feat that many people—even many aviators—had thought impossible. Making Lindbergh's triumph all the more newsworthy was that he flew without a copilot, a radio, or even a front window for thirty-three and a half hours in a single-engine airplane made from wood, canvas, and piano wire. The New York Times showed its awe by devoting its first five pages to the dimple-chinned American's landing at Le Bourget, the dusty airfield where 100,000 Frenchmen—nearly all of them chanting "Lan-Bairgh! Lan-Bairgh!"—were so eager to stare at the spent pilot that they almost trampled him to death after he climbed out of his cockpit. Maintenance crews swept up a ton of personal items lost or abandoned in that lovefest, including a sable coat and six sets of false teeth.

In the week that followed, Lindbergh, in new clothes made by a Paris tailor, was seen by the president and premier of France, the French chamber of deputies, and a million more Frenchmen who lined a parade route along the Champs-Élysées. After leaving France he was presented to the king of Belgium, the king of England (who asked, "How did you pee?"), and the prince of Wales (the future duke of Windsor), whom Lindbergh quickly replaced as the most photographed person on earth. Returning home, he was gawked at by 300,000 Americans at the Washington Monument, where President Coolidge pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on his chest. Four million New Yorkers showered him with cheers and paper scraps, as 10,000 schoolchildren sang "Hail the Conquering Hero Comes," in the largest ticker-tape parade the world had ever seen. Taking a three-month "victory lap," Lindbergh flew his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, to every state in the union; rode in 1,300 miles of motorcades; gave 147 speeches; and was seen, in the flesh, by 30 million people—one out of every four Americans then living. Still, none of this prepared Lindbergh for the way he was stared at on November 28, 1930, the day the world's most famous man was introduced to the person some considered the world's smartest.

Ironically, that day began with steps aimed at preventing Lindbergh from being stared at. Before entering his black Franklin sedan outside his rented home in Princeton, New Jersey, Lindbergh slipped a pair of lensless eyeglasses over his famously blue eyes and a fedora hat over his equally famous blond hair. Much to his pleasure, he'd found this simple disguise was usually enough to afford him some privacy in public. Privacy was always important to Lindbergh, but it was crucial this morning because he wanted to think quietly in his car as he made the two-hour drive into New York, without interruptions from starstruck toll takers or fellow motorists. What Lindbergh wanted to think about was the list of questions he planned to ask the man he was driving to meet, a man whose name he'd only recently heard for the first time.

He heard it from Dr. Paluel Flagg, the anesthetist who attended Lindbergh's wife, the former Anne Morrow, when she gave birth to the Lindberghs' first child, Charles Jr., on June 22, 1930. Lindbergh had met his wife in December 1927 when he flew to Mexico City, an event that caused nearly as much pandemonium as his landing in Paris. Anne, then an introverted twenty-one-year-old college student, was worried at first that her Christmas holiday with her family at the U.S. embassy—her father, Dwight, was the American ambassador—would be spoiled by the presence of someone she called "a sort of baseball player."

But that anxiety vanished when the tall, handsome aviator took the ambassador's middle daughter on her first airplane flight, a thrill that Anne, a short brunette unsure of her own attractiveness, described in her diary in near-orgasmic terms. Lindbergh "moved so very little" in the cockpit, "yet you felt the harmony of it," she wrote. "It was a complete and intense experience." The pilot and his sated passenger were married on May 27, 1929, in a secret ceremony at Next Day Hill, the Morrow family mansion set on a verdant fifty-acre estate overlooking the Hudson River in Englewood, New Jersey. Most of the two dozen guests thought they'd been invited to play bridge.

When Anne went into labor in the same mansion the next summer, her husband, waiting in the next room, struck up a conversation with Dr. Flagg. The topic was Anne's older sister Elisabeth, whose health had deteriorated dramatically after a bout of rheumatic fever damaged her heart's mitral valve, the valve that regulates the flow of blood from the left atrium into the left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber.

Lindbergh, who knew a fair bit about valves in machines, was puzzled that a mere valve in the heart—the body's engine, as he saw it—could cause so much trouble in an otherwise vibrant woman in her mid-twenties. He was similarly vexed to learn that not one of the doctors consulted by Elisabeth's family, several of whom Lindbergh had questioned personally, had any ideas on how to proceed. Lindbergh had several: remove and replace the broken valve, as he would do in an airplane engine; replace the entire heart with a mechanical pump—an "artificial heart," he called it—just as Lindbergh would replace a failed airplane motor; or insert a temporary blood pump, remove the heart, fix it, then put it back.

Lindbergh spoke to Flagg about Elisabeth Morrow's situation because he noticed that the anesthetist had brought with him a machine he invented to give artificial respiration to newborns, in case a breathing emergency arose with the Lindberghs' baby. Fascinated by all things mechanical, Lindbergh asked for permission to examine the device, which was made of an oxygen tank, a pressure regulator, and several feet of rubber tubing.

The Immortalists
Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever. Copyright © by David Friedman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever by David M. Friedman
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