Charles Lindbergh's Quest for Immortality

With the disappearance of Steve Fossett calling to mind other great American adventurers, the *Los Angeles Times *has with nicely coincidental timing published a review of The Immortalists, David Friedman's new book of the strange partnership between aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh and Nobel Prize-winning doctor Alexis Carrel.

During the 1930's, the two labored at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research to perfect a pump that could revitalize failing organs removed during surgery and preserve the indefinitely. To Lindbergh, who saw the body mechanistically, as though our parts could be replaced -- as with an airplane -- in perpetuity, this was the path to immortality.

Far from simply footing the bill, Lindbergh participated actively in the research. But for all his intellectual brilliance and physical daring, there was a dark side to the work:

... their research was allied with a disturbing vision: Alarmed by the state of Western civilization, which they saw as besieged by inferior races and weak genes, they hoped to bestow immortality on an elite that would dominate lesser beings. [...]

Carrel saw democracy as "an error of the brain"; "There is no escaping the fact that man was definitely not created equal," he told the New
York Times in 1935. That year, he published the bestselling "Man, the
Unknown," which Friedman calls a "blend of science and spiritualism, self-denial and sexism, nostalgia and authoritarianism, hubris and eugenics." Arguing that "the feeble-minded and the man of intelligence should not be equal before the law," Carrel proposed a "high council of experts" to help perfect humankind by eliminating the criminally insane and other undesirables.

And while Carrel drew the line at supporting Nazi Germany, Lindbergh was perfectly willing to compromise -- even favor -- them. None of that comes through in this fascinating time capsule of a 1938 Time article, of which the cover image above is a companion. Yet despite these odious origins, the technologies they refined would contribute, decades later, to the science of modern organ transplantation.

'The Immortalists' by David Friedman [Los Angeles Times]

Men in Black [Time]