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The other feat was to remove a dog's goitre and put it back upside down. The reversed thyroid functioned well; the dog lived. Dr. Carrel received a call to McGill University. Soon he moved on to the University of Chicago where he, with Dr. Charles Claude Guthrie, perfected the technique of transferring kidneys, ovaries, thyroids, legs from one dog to another. Upon that accomplishment Dr. Carrel sailed into the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan in 1906. Six years later the first Nobel Prize ever awarded to a U. S. doctor of medicine went to Alexis Carrel for his suturing of blood vessels and transplantation of organs.
Heart. At Rockefeller Institute Dr. Carrel, with Dr. Montrose Thomas Burrows, elaborating methods developed by Yale's Dr. Ross Granville Harrison, duplicated the blood of a chicken so successfully that the famed piece of unborn chicken's heart began to grow & grow. If in the 23 years since that experiment started his assistants had not periodically pared the embryonic tissue and destroyed the parings, the whole earth might now (theoretically) be covered with a film of soft flesh.
His imagination aflame with success, Dr. Carrel told a convention of the American Medical Association: "I found that permanent life outside the organism was possible. . . . The tissues actually used in human surgery, as cartilage, periosteum, skin, and aponeuroses, could easily be taken in large quantities from the fresh cadavers of fetuses and infants and preserved in vaseline and in cold storage. A supply of tissues in latent life would be constantly ready for use, and the tubes containing the tissues could even be sent in small refrigerators of the type of the thermos bottle to surgeons who need them."
That prediction came true only two years ago when Dr. Harvey Brinton Stone of Johns Hopkins transplanted thyroid tissue from one patient to another. Theretofore all tissue transplants either invalided the patient or died after doing only temporary good. Dr. Stone succeeded because he first soaked the thyroid tissue in serum from the blood of the patient who was to receive it (TIME. Dec. 18, 1933). By doing that Dr. Stone followed fundamental procedures developed by Dr. Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute.
Wife & War. Dr. Carrel has determined, he declares in Man, the Unknown; that women should not make excessive sexual demands upon men of genius. He waited until he was 40 before he married Anne de la Motte de la Mairie, widow of the Marquis de la Mairie—a large, handsome woman.
Dr. Carrel who long wanted to be a soldier and once talked of going to South America to start a revolution and become a dictator, rushed into the French Army as a lieutenant at the outbreak of War. He won the Legion of Honor, soon became a major. John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave him a hospital at Compiègne. There with Research Chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin he perfected the famed Carrel-Dakin antiseptic solution for the treatment of infected wounds. Mrs. Carrel drove an ambulance close behind the front.