LINDBERGH CHOOSES AN ISLAND

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 17, 21 January 1939, Page 22

LINDBERGH CHOOSES AN ISLAND

COLONEL CHARLES AUGUSTUS LINDBERGH is a muchdiscussed person these days, writes' Ferdinand Tuohy in "The Sphere." "The Lawrence \ of the Air," so-called, at least resembles the immortal other Shaw in one respect: in his genius for gaining publicity while seemingly doing every blessed thing to avoid it.

Has the post-war era's prime hero blotted his copybook in the eyes of his folks at home by accepting the highest (foreign) Nazi distinction? Did he report adversely on the Russian Air Force, and, if so, to what State or States? And who may have sent the colonel off on that mission or did he fly off on his own? Should he conduct himself more as a neutral while enjoying the protracted, indefinite hospitality of Britain, including special facilities?

I know as much about the. correct answers to the above questions (save possibly the first) as the next person. For aught I know, the flying fool of May 20, 1927, the idol of two hemi; spheres of that memorable day, may have three sides to him in 1938: the great private airman, the honoured, expert observer, of, and reporter on, other nations' aviation, anH. the man of science. It is of number three that I wish to write, while at the same time prefacing matters by recalling to Lindbergh's current critics that two years ago he went on record in Berlin, in a moving and rare speech, as a profound aspirant after peace in the sky, hoping to see the time when his flying brethren of all nations would use the aeroplane only for progress and the good and enjoyment of humanity.

Not long ago I was staying in Brittany, hard by the island that Lindbergh has taken, with Dr. Alexis Carrel, in order that the pair may henceforward isolatedly pursue experiments, into such matters as keeping hearts, lungs, kidneys functioning by artificial means; and of this business one can at least write with less of a mystery note than were one presuming to deal with the colonel's activity in other directions. As a fact," I was back in a bygone ambience, having had a cottage on the neighbouring island of Brehat just 14 years before thel Lindbergh-Carrel menages took over St. Gildas and I Iliec. The two last form part of an | exposed and: rocky group rising just ? off the rock-reefed coast, and tbughly/ facing Plymouth. * j

Even in summer the isles' can be J tempestuously cut off for days at aj time. In winter they are mostly -un- j approachable in the howling wind and dashing seas of this notoriously inhospitable coast. On Brehat, most of the year round, the women wear vast, enclosing bonnets, second only to the Maltese variety, but as protection,

against constant storm, not, as Malta lore insists on having it, as a relic of female protection against soldiers. In my day (which sounds archaic, none the less fourteen years ago is a long time, the way you and I and everything have been moving), in my day almost the only resident on the isles was a Russian countess whom the highly-suspicious Celtic natives looked upon as a godless Bolshevik witch, whereas the poor woman was only a White Russian "intellectual" with one of the first advanced escape complexes. This wild strip of coast has long attracted the artistically inclined or suffering, on account of its primitive inhabitants and landscape—although both are now fast vanishing. On pine-sheltered Iliec, Lindbergh's domestic retreat, in its only house, Ambrose Thomas lived and died. At Port Blanc lived Brittany's two leading latter-day men of letters, Le Braz and Botrel. At the chateau of Costares, close by, Sienkiewicz wrote most of "Quo Vadis."

It is little wonder that Lindbergh is hyper-sensitive and isolation-craving after what he experienced under the hideous trommelfeuer- that surrounded the century's perhaps most resounding crime, but it is not all Innisfree at St. Gildas, as for quite two months in summer, when he likes best to be there, the Breton shore is packed with holidaymakers. Last August, about thej time the colonel hopped off lor Russia, the curious were circling his isle in anything from canoes and launches to aquaplanes, with clear intent to land and hero-worship.

St. Gildas, where Div Carrel Jives,. is the scientist's headquarters because its sturdy farmhouse and outbuildings offered the only accommodation h

sight for even modified research work. Iliec lies just behind, and a launch takes the colonel across to the Carrel laboratory in no time. St. Gildas also boasts a sandy beach in a tree-protected little bay, though whether the Lindbergh children have benefited from this. or have been in the neighbourhood at all, does not arise. All one can testify to "is that a special brand, of" cream bun has been named after them in a patisserie of the market town of Treguier. From Treguier, renowned as Renan's birthplace, have come the stores and supplies for the distinguished islanders, via Port Blanc. A car for excursioning would be hired there, too, though I believe Lindbergh has to keep his special Miles Hawk right round at Dinan aerodrome. Through Treguier also travels the bulky daily mail concerning which Madame Carrel relates: "We have a big cupboard filled with thousands of letters, duly classified. Some of them ought to be framed. Recently we had one^from an Austrian woman who said her husband had been dead six months, that she was preserving his body in a cold room, and would the doctor and the colonel come and bring him back to life!" One heard this, and much else, in the debit (pub) by the landing stage at Port Blanc. "It is harder to get on to St. Gildas than to get through the Maginot Line." "They will fire on you." "Dogs will attack you." "They have electrified cables." "They have bruisers who will send you packing," All of .which is much exaggerated. The truth being that barbed wire has beenput up, at-certain points, chiefly to pretvent island-crashing by people with

With Dr. Carrel He Attacks the Problem of Life

faked letters of introduction, and that a small company of Breton fishermen are co-operating with a personal bodyguard of the hefty variety to keep the two islands inviolate.

Nevertheless, Brittany remains Brittany, credulous land of dark legend still, and "Lindbergh Island" has not failed to join that legend, old women even going the length of holding forth about korrigans (evil spirits) on St. Gildas, where men are carving up human bodies and defying the immutable laws. When you come to think of it, there is just a little of the Frankensteinian in what is going on, yet how very little! Nothing, for example, like the scene in. America when Dr. Carrel is in action there: — Amid eighteen Lindbergh perfusion pumps, each enclosing a vital organ or piece of tissue, officiates the high priest of biology. White-clad women enter, glance at a pump, cast a practised eye on a living morsel. They look and act like nurses, and, in fact, this chamber is a new type of hospital whose patients are livers, spleens, kidneys, and ovaries. When the high priest is dissecting:— He robes himself and his assistants in black to avoid reflections. Even the hoods that' cover heads are black, revealing only the eyes. The room is windowless. No shadows are cast by the lights overhead. Tables are draped in black cloths. Furniture is black. Supposing our old Breton women erred into that on St. Gildas! But there's no fear of this happening; everything is unspectacular, by comparison, on this side of the ocean, even if, in the words of Dr. Carrel," he and

Lindgergh came to St. Gildas "to continue experiments aimed at reproducing the functions of the human heart with ordinary mechanism. It is not a machine to replace the heart, but the apparatus can play the part of the heart and lungs, as it can protect these organs from bacteria and infection. Yet it may be twenty-five years before our invention can be applied."

In the partnership Lindbergh is the mechanical genius and Carrel the repository of unique knowledge of the human body. There is rather an uncanny link between the murdered Lindbergh child and his father's present efforts to preserve life in human organs, in that it was the, anaesthetist of Mrs. Lindbergh at the unhappy infant's birth who first brought the colonel to Rockefeller Institute where he fell under the spell of Carrel and his work. Lindbergh saw primitive "perfusion pumps" in operation, splashing blood over organs, and learnt how difficult it was to keep out bacteria.1 "Lindbergh," says Carrel, "is extremely interested in science. He is clever and tenacious and has the merit of always seeking the simplest and most| practical solutions." Lindbergh set about perfecting that pump. '' Just what is it and what does it serve? Here we need to state Carrel's pathway to his hoped-for goal. As a young doctor in Lyons forty years ago Carrel decided to follow in the footsteps of the great Claude Bernard and to study life as life and infer what he could about it. Not study it from death —lifeless cells, bloodless muscles. No use trying to reach sound conclusions about life from "mere meat." Bernard had insisted that every organ had its "internal milieu," that

structure, function, and environment formed a unity and should be studied as such.

To get his first living organ, Carrel twenty-six years ago cut the fleck of a beating heart from an incubating unborn chick and transferred a segment of it to its "environment" of embryonic chicken juice, Carrel's own invention. The culture remains alive to this day, carefully tended by nurses •who bathe it and regulate its diet. The point is that the tissue's structure and function can interplay, in its proper environment.

Yet the culture told nothing about growing old because it did not age itself as do organs through chemical changes. Therefore, whole living organs would ,have to be studied in specially invented glass bodies, and that was where Lindbergh eventually stepped in, perfusion pumps putting aeroplanes quite in second place.

Nor is there any mistaking the success of the Lindbergh pump which has kept upwards of 1000 organs alive —hearts, livers, spleens, the hearts beating on, the glands secreting, other organs functioning just as tliey do within the bodies from which they've been taken. Lindbergh's great difficulty was to overcome the common tendency to blood coagulation. His apparatus had to, be most minutely conceived.

It is now as good as- certain that the pathologist of the future will be able to watch the progress of TB in a lung section, or observe arteries hardening, or follow glands actually at work, the thyroid, pituitary, adrenal, whose hormones differentiate us one from another. Further, it should be possible to study the process of ageing of blood and tissue, and from that pass on to improving their quality, i.c,. giving greater protection against disease. ' "Rid ourselves of toxic products and we'll regularly live to be 100 and more!" proclaims Carrel. - , . . . Looking across a wicked sea at St. Gildas, perhaps one understood how old Breton women should talk of korrigans. One also understood why these two men should be left in p&ace, bent over their "medical engineering," as they call it. For there may well be bigger things germinating on this Breton spot than a bold solo crossing of the ocean by means of an invention today seriously criticised if not widely cursed.

j The Lindbergh-Carrel partnership is j permanent. The first, it is said, will not. return home until his children are able to look after themselves. On the other hand, the doctor, who leaves Rockefeller Institute in 1939 and sets up in his own laboratory, should head each summer for the isles, there to check up on experiments and inventive advance with his illustrious collaborator.