(See front cover)
Not one of the 22 great medical scientists who are members of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Manhattan has a reputation with the man-in-the-street equal to that of a minor volunteer worker at the Institute named Charles Augustus Lindbergh. Familiar only to the small scientific circle is the mighty attack of Dr. Florence Sabin upon the germ of tuberculosis. Every cancer specialist is aware of Rous's sarcoma but outside the Institute's walls Dr. Peyton Rous is a personal unknown. It took a Nobel Prize in 1930 and the recent use of his blood analysis in bastardy cases to put Dr. Karl Landsteiner into the lay Press. Long ago Dr. Alexis Carrel had some small renown as the man who had found a way to keep a piece of chicken heart living and growing through the years. Lately the name of Carrel has been whirled up to fresh fame because Bio-mechanic Lindbergh designed him an artificial heart with which to pump life into human hearts, kidneys, thyroids, ovaries and because the Press knew the newsworthiness of the name of Lindbergh, if not of Carrel (TIME, July 1).
Last week Dr. Carrel was, as usual, vacationing in a chateau near Lyons in his native France. And, as usual, what the Press wanted to hear him talk about was his famed assistant at the Institute. The small, bald, 62-year-old scientist duly obliged: "Lindbergh is considered . . . exclusively as a flyer . . . but he is much more than that. He is a great savant. Men who achieve such things are capable of accomplishments in all domains."
Facts & Feats. Despite popular impressions, Dr. Carrel is not the tail of the Lindbergh kite. He has had a fine full career of his own, which, had it been in politics or retail merchandising or baseball, instead of scientific research, would have made him a familiar character to newsreaders from coast to coast. After looking back on that career for more than a year, Dr. Carrel this week published a book into which he packed the essence of his experiences, philosophy and intuition as a doctor and as a man. He called it Man, the Unknown.* Its theme is that Science has itemized most of the facts of mankind but has never added them up into the total of man's huge potentialities.
The observations of man and life which he put into Man, the Unknown began when Alexis Carrel, son of a silk merchant, was a medical student at the University of Lyons. There he acquired surgical dexterity by tying two pieces of catgut with his index and middle fingers inside a small cardboard box so securely that no one could untie them with two hands. He also achieved the feat of sewing 500 stitches into a single sheet of cigaret paper. Shortly after graduation he did two surgical tricks that brought him quick professional reputation. He devised the most successful way of sewing the cut ends of an artery together: put draw strings through each end of the artery: pull until the circular edges acquire a triangular shape; bend the flaps outward; put the two triangles together; hem the fringe of flaps together. The inside of the artery is now smooth; hence no blood clot will form there.