Glass Heart

In April 1928, the German plane Bremen made the first non-stop westbound flight across the Atlantic, was forced down on remote Greenly Island at the mouth of the frozen St. Lawrence River. Avid for news, the New York World sent Flyers Floyd Bennett, who was half-sick, and Bernt Balchen flying to Greenly Island. They landed at Lake Ste. Agnes near Murray Bay, where Bennett could go no farther. A plane returned him to a hospital in Quebec where he developed a fulminating case of pneumonia. Pneumonia serum available at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan might save Floyd Bennett's life. Charles Augustus Lindbergh sped to the Rockefeller Institute, snatched a supply of pneumonia serum, sped to his plane, flew to Quebec. But Floyd Bennett died.

Shortly after that first frantic visit to the Rockefeller Institute Colonel Lindbergh went secretly to work there as a biomechanical assistant to Nobel Prizeman Alexis Carrel. Dr. Carrel was trying to keep human organs alive for long periods so that physiologists could study their reactions piecemeal. For more than 100 years physiologists had tried to do so, with no real success, ever since Frenchman Julien-Jean-Cesar Legallois (1770-1814) predicted: "If one could substitute for the heart a kind of injection ... of arterial blood, either natural or artificially made . . . one would succeed easily in maintaining alive indefinitely any part of the body." But like many an experimenter before him, Dr. Carrel found that "there was no apparatus capable of playing the role of heart and lungs and of keeping an organ free from infection indefinitely." And infection meant death.

In the course of his researches, Dr. Carrel developed a method of transplanting an organ from one body to another. As a result of his work a man with a damaged kidney can in some cases today get it replaced with a healthy kidney from another man willing to spare the organ. But Dr. Carrel's plans of keeping whole hearts, kidneys, ovaries and other organs alive artificially were at a standstill in 1928 when Mechanic Lindbergh became his assistant. The technique was known and the nutrient fluids were at hand. But still lacking was a germ-proof device to pump the fluids through the organs.

Dr. Lindbergh (LL. D., Northwestern and Wisconsin) put his mechanical wits to work and in May 1931 was able to publish anonymously in Science a skimpy description of a pump which Dr. Carrel desired and he designed. It consisted of a spirally coiled glass tube, resembling a hot water heater. The top opening of the Lindbergh tube was connected to the bottom opening by a straight glass tube, and the liquid sealed into the closed tubular circuit. By standing the coil on end and wobbling it, centrifugal force pushed the fluid up to the top of the spiral. There the fluid sloshed over into the straight down tube, and back into the bottom of the coil.

This was a germ-proof pump. By suitable ingress and outlet, Dr. Lindbergh was able to force oxygen or other gases into the continuously circulating fluid and draw it off again. Thus he had a mechanical duplicate of the lungs, heart and blood vessels. Nothing remained but to modify this apparatus so that Dr. Carrel could attach a heart, kidney or ovary to it.

Last spring, according to Dr. Carrel, "a model was developed that for the first time permitted an entire organ to live outside the body. . . . After 123 years the conception of Legallois was realized."

Pushing ahead with their experiment. Drs. Carrel and Lindbergh chloroformed and bled to death adult chickens and cats. They extirpated hearts, kidneys, ovaries, adrenal glands, thyroid glands, spleens and within an hour connected the arteries of those organs with the circulating system of their aseptic wobble pump. Pump and organ were inclosed within an aseptic glass tank.

To nourish those organs, they circulated growth-activating fluids which Dr. Lillian Eloise Baker of the Rockefeller Institute supplied them, containing blood serum, insulin, thyroxine, vitamin A, vitamin C, etc. The ''lungs'' of the apparatus refreshed the "blood" with a steady injection of air composed of 40% oxygen, 3% carbon dioxide, the balance nitrogen. The whole apparatus was kept at blood heat in an incubator, was rocked so that "blood" pulsed through the organ, almost exactly as in life.

What the experimenters saw take place dumbfounded and delighted them. Dr. Lindbergh hastened to write a detailed description of the apparatus for the Rockefeller Institute's abstruse Journal of Experimental Medicine. It will appear later this year. Dr. Carrel, who says Assistant Lindbergh has "one of the keenest and most intuitive and inventive minds possible to imagine,'' wanted to tell the world of science the all important things they had done. Last week Science printed their joint report--one of the clearest papers to come out of the Rockefeller Institute in all its 32 years of existence.

In their collaboration Drs. Carrel & Lindbergh reported: "Changes in form and volume took place in the organs from day to day. Thyroid glands perfused with diluted serum were observed to decrease in size progressively. On the contrary, ovaries or thyroids perfused with a growth-promoting medium modified their form and grew rapidly. In five days, the weight of an ovary increased from 90 mg. to 284 mg." Simultaneously yellow spots which developed on the ovaries suggested that they, while attached to the glass heart, might actually have produced eggs. If so, laboratory technicians conceivably might some day fertilize and incubate such motherless eggs to produce chicks or kittens. Because Dr. Robert E. Cornish of Berkeley, Calif, has revived "dead" dogs by forcing relatively crude chemicals into their veins and then wobbling them on a seesaw, an unrestrained imagination last week could foresee Drs. Carrel & Lindbergh placing whole animals--chickens. cats, dogs, possibly superannuated human beings--in their wobble machine and keeping them alive indefinitely.

But the Rockefeller Institute experimenters last week had no such fantastic ideas. They believe that knowledge of the human body is the sum of knowledge of each one of its parts. Hence they intend to study one organ at a time in their machine. Thus they hope to make the thyroid gland, the adrenals and each of the other endocrine glands yield their hormones in pure form and in such abundance that endocrinologists will no longer be obliged to haunt slaughterhouses for their supplies. Thus, too, they hope to watch hardening developing in arteries, goitres in thyroids, tuberculosis in lungs, rheumatic fever in hearts, Bright's Disease in kidneys. When that work is done they will have reached the goal which Hippocrates set for physicians 2,300 years ago. Life, disease and death will be resolved into simple factors of chemistry and physics of cells and germs. This blood count, that temperature and a rash, for example, will definitely equal a sickness which physicians can prevent by cut & dried technique. Then Medicine will cease to be a fine art, will become an exact science.

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