Stillborn Animals Revived By Laboratory Device

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22872, 16 February 1949, Page 4

Stillborn Animals Revived By Laboratory Device

(From a Reuter Correspondent.) PARIS. A life-creating machine which has revived stillborn calves and lambs is being perfected in France by Professor j. Andre Thomas, leading French biologist , who claims great surgical, medical and biological possibilities for the invention. Small and easy to manipulate and regulate the new machine can produce “survival” for an unlimited time, according to the professor, who is the director of the laboratory of experimental cellular biology at the Paris Curie Institute. Professor Thomas said it has brought to life extinct foetus of cattle and sheep and had made virus grow on them. It had also given life to separate organisms of humans and animals, including the human placenta, the structure which carried blood and nourishment from the mother to her unborn child. Artificial Circulation Professor Thomas said that how to make organisms live separately from the body by means of perfusion-arti-ficial circulation —had long been known to physiologists, but “the problem was to discover the exact nature of the survival of organs and organisms in such a way as to permit realisations of the experiments of the general physiologists and cytologists.” Professor Thomas said “we had to produce a machine that permitted using blood that was suitably oxygenised and sterile—a machine which would reproduce all the physiological characteristics of the organ, animal or human, including the rhythm of the heart's expansion and contraction, maximum and minimum blood pressure and so on. This machine has to be able to use blood indefinitely without the globules being destroyed. “The machine we have made does this by rubber veins. It pumps the blood, thus taking the part of the heart while the oxygenating apparatus takes the part of the lungs.”