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"The method of tissue culture and that of the culture of whole organs have provided us with the means of . .. . studying the food requirements of each cell type and of each tissue while active and at rest. Thus will be discovered the nature of the specific chemicals demanded by a given organ for its growth and normal function. Perhaps it may then become feasible to supply the living body with the substances indispensable to the development of any organ, or to its regeneration. Instead of injecting hormones into a patient, we .would supply the glands with appropriate nutrient substances and induce them to develop, or to regenerate, and again to secrete hormones. To bring about the regeneration within the pancreas . . . would be a far more efficient method of treating diabetes than to inject insulin daily into the body of the patient. . . .
"From this moment [we are] opening to experimental investigation a forbidden field: the living human body. . . . Organs removed from the human body, in the course of an operation or soon after death, could be revived in the Lindbergh pump, and made to function again when perfused with an artificial fluid. . . . When larger apparatus are built, entire human organs, such as pancreas, suprarenal, thyroid, and other glands . . . would manufacture in vitro the substances supplied today to patients by horses or rabbits.
"The construction of larger pumps may lead to other applications of the method. For instance, diseased organs could be removed from the body and placed in the Lindbergh pump as patients are placed in a hospital. Then they could be treated far more energetically than within the organism, and if cured replanted in the patient. A thyroid extirpated in the course of an operation ... a kidney removed for tuberculosis, or a leg amputated for osteosarcoma, would perhaps heal under the influence of an artificial medium when living in vitro. The replantation would offer no difficulty, as surgical techniques for the suture of blood vessels and the transplantation of organs and limbs were developed long ago." In effect, Dr. Carrel, with the Lindbergh pump, is looking for the fountain of abundant, replaceable age.
Carrels & Lindberghs. The eight years that the Carrels and Lindberghs have known each other have made them fast friends. Colonel Lindbergh deeply admires Dr. Carrel, when in Manhattan follows him all around the Rockefeller Institute. Dr. Carrel admires Colonel Lindbergh, declares him to be a great man. Dr. Carrel, as indicated by his philosophical Man the Unknown, does not think there are too many great men around.
The Lindberghs this week are in Kent, in a big L-shaped, hard-to-heat house composed of an old barn and four old cottages joined together. They rent the place and three acres of ground from Novelist Victoria Sackville-West, but are giving it up this month to move to the French island of Illiec, off the north coast of Brittany. Mme Carrel, who lives most of the year on the neighboring island of St. Gildas, recently secured it for them. With the barren island went a three-story stone house of nine big rooms. Illiec provides all the seclusion that the shy and, for their children, understandably frightened Lindberghs desire. But when the English Channel tide is out, the Lindberghs may walk over almost dry rock to St. Gildas.