(See front cover) A secluded labyrinth of black, dustless, germless laboratories zigzags across the top floor of the main building of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Manhattan. Black are the floors, black the furniture, dark grey the windowless walls, shadowless the bleak illumination that comes through the skylights. Entrance to this aseptic, dustless, reflectionless hideaway is by a spiral staircase from an anteroom on the floor below. Only scientists particularly interested in fractioning life to its lowest common denominators may mount that spiral. And all must wash their hands and faces, put on gowns and hoods of black cloth—all except the master of this pure and dark domain, master of its purified and black-clad servants. He, the most famed member of the Rockefeller Institute, Dr. Alexis Carrel, distinguishes himself from the others with a little white headpiece that looks like the hat of a U. S. bluejacket.
This week, Dr. Carrel was in royal good humor. Just off the presses were two books—Methods of Tissue Culture by Raymond C. Parker-and Culture of Organs by Alexis Carrel and Charles A. Lindberghf—which formally presented to medicine the sum of Nobel Laureate Carrel's 40 years in science. More than any other man, Scientist Carrel has made it possible to study tissue and organs outside of their organisms, but alive. Just as Audubon's first scientific observations of living birds immeasurably advanced ornithology beyond the study of lifeless stuffed specimens, this new technique in physiology leaves classical anatomy and dissection far behind.
The largest immediate benefit of the twin volumes (Dr. Carrel wrote the introduction to Assistant Parker's work) will be to make known the methods of Dr. Carrel's surgery and Aviator Lindbergh's perfusion pump to a far larger body of scientists than it would be practical to instruct in the Rockefeller Institute's Stygian laboratories. Incidentally, the books should still a number of wild rumors of occult doings at the Institute which the penny press has spread through the lay world. Such rumors are typified by the recent announcement in English newspapers that Charles Lindbergh was preparing to have his heart removed and replaced by an indestructible one from grateful Dr. Carrel's stock. In point of fact, however, the Carrel-Lindbergh-Parker books boldly point to a medical future only slightly less fabulous.