Organ Culture at the Rockefeller Institute

THE celebrated surgeon Alexis Carrel, pioneer in the surgery of blood vessels and a leader in the development of tissue culture, dreamed of the day when human organs might be grown in flasks for study of their function and for use in replacing diseased organs of patients. Tissue culture was possible because the cells and fragments were small enough to be nourished by diffusion from the surrounding medium. Whole organs had to be supplied with nutritive fluids by perfusion through their blood vessels. This required a sterilizable glass pump, into which bacteria could not penetrate. When Carrel and his technicians ran into difficulty in designing a pump, he found an unexpected ally in Charles Lindbergh, the aviator. Lindbergh had become interested in the idea of an artificial heart to substitute for the human heart during operations on that organ, and hearing of Carrel´s work, volunteered his services as an amateur inventor and mechanic. Beginning work at the Rockefeller Institute in 1930, Lindbergh worked as a volunteer in Carrel´s laboratory for about five years. His first pump was a coil of glass tubing rotated by a motor as one waves a flag, so that the centrifugal force drove the fluid into a chamber containing the explanted organ. This pump proved to be not perfectly bacteria-proof and did not produce a pulsating flow. Continuing his very ingenious efforts, in 1934, Lindbergh found he could use glass valves, and produced a design which was executed by the Institute´s glass-blower, Otto Hopf.