Matthew Turner
Hershey, Pennsylvania, United States

Following his successful solo trans-Atlantic flight in the Spirit of Saint Louis in 1927, aviator Charles Augustus Lindbergh became an international celebrity. He was Time magazine’s very first Man of the Year in 1927, and was seen as an American hero for over a decade.¹ One of Lindbergh’s greatest achievements—the perfusion pump—would be overshadowed by his controversial partnership with an ardent eugenicist.

Lindbergh first became interested in the possibility of a mechanical heart pump in 1929² when his sister-in-law was diagnosed with mitral stenosis secondary to rheumatic heart disease.³ When the physician told him that an operation could not be done because the heart could not be stopped for long enough for the operation to take place, Lindbergh questioned why “a mechanical pump could not be substituted until the arrested heart could be repaired.”² Lindbergh soon met with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a vascular surgeon with the Rockefeller Institute.³ Carrel was already a famous scientist and acclaimed surgeon, having won a Nobel Prize in 1912 for his development of vascular suturing.⁴ The two men determined that the novel concept of cardiopulmonary bypass was beyond current capability because of the difficulty of oxygenating the blood. Instead, they focused on a perfusion system that could be developed for transplanted organs and “maintaining the viability of an individual organ outside the body.”² The first successful open-heart surgery with total cardiopulmonary bypass—Lindbergh’s original vision²—would not be accomplished until 1953.⁵

Carrel and Lindbergh collaborated for several years, even writing a book together about the potential of transplanted organs entitled The Culture of Organs.² Lindbergh particularly enjoyed working alone in the Rockefeller Institute laboratories, testing out various designs.⁴ Ultimately, they designed the Lindbergh-Carrel perfusion pump, a sterilized glass instrument that would contain an organ and perfuse it through its connecting artery, allowing the organ to survive outside the body.³ The perfusion fluid had already been designed by Carrel, and consisted of a mix of insulin, blood serum, and amino acids. The pump pulsated the fluid at similar pressures to the body, perfusing it with oxygen and nitrogen.³ Backflow was prevented by a number of valves, and sterility was ensured through the use of cotton bulbs.³ While the device was ultimately determined to be impractical and was never widely used,³ it laid the foundation for later organ perfusion devices. Lindbergh maintained an interest in organ perfusion for the rest of his life and participated in the design of several other perfusion machines.⁴ One famous physician, Dr. Richard Bing, once said of Lindbergh, “…as a flyer [he] was to me of very minor interest—but as a man who kept organs alive outside the body, he was a hero.”²

Unfortunately, Carrel and Lindbergh were not without their controversies. Carrel was an ardent eugenicist, and in his 1935 book Man, the Unknown, he strongly argued against democracy and imagined a utopian society ruled by an educated elite in which the “unfit” would be euthanized in gas chambers.⁶ Carrel’s scientific fame and his partnership with Lindbergh helped bring him even greater international attention, which he used as a platform to act as a eugenics propagandist.⁶ This was by no means a new issue for him; even before his 1912 Nobel Prize, Carrel was fascinated by eugenics and acted on an advisory committee for sterilization set up by the American Breeders Association in 1911 as a “means for eliminating the defective strains from the population.”⁶ He often lamented the “feeble-mindedness” that he claimed plagued Western civilization and became more and more ardent about the threatening “extinction of the best elements of the race.”⁶ In his final chapter of Man, the Unknown, Carrel stated that “the useless and harmful beings” of society “should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied with proper gases.”⁶ Lindbergh’s popularity with the public, plus Carrel’s well-known friendship with the aviator, played a significant role in the publication of the book.⁶ Carrel’s popularity within the US soon waned, and in 1941 he returned to his homeland of France, where he collaborated with the pro-Nazi Vichy regime to create an “institute for the regeneration of race.”⁶ He died in 1944, several months before the conclusion of the war.⁶

Lindbergh’s public partnership with Carrel, as well as his seeming sympathies with Nazi Germany and his vociferous opposition to American involvement in the Second World War, severely tarnished his reputation.⁷ While not as outspoken regarding eugenics as Carrel and denying any Nazi affiliation, Lindbergh often injected racial undertones into his speeches, at one point calling for Europe and the United States to “defend the white race against foreign invasion.”¹

To this day, the legacies of Lindbergh and Carrel remain controversial. While their advancements in medical science cannot be denied, the two men’s reputations are tarnished by the ugly ideologies they embraced.

References

1. Olson L. Those angry days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s fight over World War II, 1939-1941. Random House Incorporated; 2013.
2. Bing RJ. Lindbergh and the biological sciences (a personal reminiscence). Texas Heart Institute Journal. 1987;14(3):230.
3. Rangappa P, Jacob I. Lindbergh and His Contribution to Extracorporeal Gas Exchange. Journal of Acute Care. 2024;3(1):56-7.
4. Malinin TI. Remembering Alexis Carrel and Charles A. Lindbergh. Texas Heart Institute Journal. 1996;23(1):28.
5. Hessel EA, editor. A brief history of cardiopulmonary bypass. Seminars in Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia; 2014: SAGE Publications Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA.
6. Reggiani AH. Drilling Eugenics into People’s Minds. Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture. 2006:70-90. 7.        
7. Martin PA. The fall of Icarus: Charles Lindbergh and the campaign against the America First Committee. The University of Texas at El Paso; 2006.