Charles Lindbergh, revered aviation hero and victim of the crime of the century, is undoubtedly an American icon. However, we don't remember Lindbergh for the frilly photograph. While recent biographers have begun to delve into the pilot's dark past, his adherence to eugenic principles, his playfulness, and his ties to Nazi Germany, one area of Lindbergh's biography that is often overlooked is his groundbreaking work in biomechanics.
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Buy Related Content A man with a lot of heart valves donates his unusual collection for a rainy day, packs snowshoesBiomechanics? Is his work in this field related to aviation - a redesigned cockpit, perhaps? Or, adding lumbar support to make transatlantic voyages easier?" Indeed, Lindbergh's contributions were quite independent, and at the time he was widely acclaimed for these accomplishments.In 1934, one of his colleagues at *** said, "The name he will leave on this science will be as brilliant as the name he left on aviation." . A failed prophecy. Today, in his *** entry, there are only a few sentences relating to his scientific contributions; among them is the story.
Charles Lindbergh was the designer of the perfusion pump, a hand-blown, 18-inch-tall structure of clear Pyrex glass used to keep the body's external organs functioning, which he succeeded in accomplishing in 1935, after culminating in a quiet collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning scientist Alexis Carrel. goal.
The device provides, or "infuses", a steady supply of oxygenated blood (or synthetic substitutes) to organs. Carrel had perfected the fluid, but he didn't have a way to apply it properly to the organs. Lindberg put his mechanical skills to work designing a three-chambered device that would hold the organ in place and allow it to be infused with Carrel's "artificial blood,"
It was simple and beautiful. The carotid artery is connected to another small glass tube, which is connected to a pump system. Air pressure will drive the fluid through the pump in a way that mimics biological processes.
Charles Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel, by Samuel Johnson Woolf, oil on canvas, 1938 (National Portrait Gallery? S.J. Woolf Estate),Only about 20 were made, but three are in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of History in Washington, D.C.
Though largely forgotten, it was important. The device was a forerunner of medical devices such as the heart-lung machine, and its process helped develop a viable method of stopping the heart from beating during surgery. The young pilot recalls thinking about life and death during his long
in the air. But when his wife's sister was diagnosed with a severe heart condition following rheumatic fever, Lindberg's calmer thoughts turned to work in applied biology. After asking his doctor why surgery couldn't reverse the damage, Lindberg was told that the surgery would take longer than it would take for the heart to be removed from the body without permanent damage. Lindberg insisted. Why couldn't a machine be used to maintain a living organ, he reasoned. But the doctor had "little interest" in the question,
Lindberg further questioned an anesthesiologist, Palulel Flagg, who was more sympathetic and directed Lindberg to Carrel, who had been working on issues related to extracorporeal organ maintenance. The very next day, Lindbergh made an appointment to meet Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute's laboratories, and no doubt such an efficient schedule was overshadowed by a bit of name recognition during that first meeting on November 28, 1930, when Lindbergh remembered that Carrel had shown him two failed attempts to build a "device similar to an artificial heart "a failed attempt, one of which would have filled life with the aroma of an organism separated from the body." Carrel explained that he had earlier determined the correct location of the perfusion fluid. The greater difficulty, however, was to build a device that would avoid bacterial contamination during the perfusion cycle.
Lindberg examined the model and said he could have done better. After leaving Carrel's lab, Lindberg was full of enthusiasm and returned two weeks later with a design and prototype that he had sent from a glassblower at Princeton University. While it was far from perfect, Carrel was impressed and offered Lindbergh space in his lab where the pilot could improve the device.
As well as problems with design and bacterial contamination, Lindbergh also had to contend with issues of reputation. After his transatlantic flight, the young pilot became even more uneasy with the frenzy of media attention. He tried to remain anonymous during his time at the institute, but with little success. On his first visit, Lindbergh tried to sneak in through a side door, but he was quickly spotted by a crowd of adoring technicians and staff
No one at the institute was allowed to discuss his work or attendance with the press, and Lindbergh was able to maintain a degree of anonymity. The *** later reported that "for more than two years he had been doing his duty without anyone having the slightest inkling of it."
The electrically powered spiral glass tube slowly began to change with the development of Lindberg's first, marginally successful pump, which was a pump that poured liquid into a spiral that flowed into a reservoir and then through a tube to the aorta of the organ. Although the design still had problems with low pressure and bacterial contamination, the device perfused the carotid artery for a month.
In May 1931, the results of a study of a device that continuously circulated fluid in a closed system were published. The article attracted little media attention, in large part because his was one of the shortest articles published in Science and probably the only one without a byline. It was, however, the first hint of a dramatic news story, e.
Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, which he flew straight from New York to Paris on May 20, 1927, was viewed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Over the next three years, Lindbergh and Carrel refined the original design and technology, and in 1935 Lindbergh described the successful device as "a pulsatile circulation of sterile fluid through an organ maintained under controlled conditions for a period of time, limited only by variations in the organ and the perfusate.This new pump has no moving parts. The air introduced into the system is filtered through sterile cotton, greatly reducing contamination problems. The entire unit is made entirely of glass and can be easily sterilized in an autoclave. The top chamber of the unit houses the organs. The perfusate is housed in the lower chamber and is delivered to the organ through a glass supply tube, ultimately allowing gravity to carry the perfusate through the chamber back to the reservoir where it began. A kind of circulation, much like that produced by the heart pumping blood.
, but the pump is still imperfect; one problem is that there is no outlet for the fluid secreted from the organ, in other words, the pump has no artificial kidney, so organ secretions mix with the perfusate, which subsequently requires frequent changes This threatens the sterility and stability of the system.
Kidney or no kidney, the pump was ready for rigorous final public testing.On April 5, 1935, Carrel and Lindbergh began a trial of perfusing the thyroid gland of cats. At the end of 18 days, blocks of tissue were transferred to cultures where epithelial cells were produced. The tissue was healthy, living and reproducible. Experiments as l research this is just the way the history of science is interpreted, with early equipment and techniques informing future developments. In this case, the lessons to be learned from the Lindbergh-Carrell collaboration are enormous.
However, when considering Lindbergh's legacy, it is easy to see how the generalized excitement of the early days may have faded when it became clear that Lindbergh was really just an engineer of now-obsolete medical devices. Thus, while Lindbergh figures prominently in the larger history of organ perfusion and medical technology (though it may still be an overstatement to say that he has left a name as illustrious in biology as he has in aviation), many may argue that medical technology is not as important to Lindbergh's historical memory, though it is perhaps worth noting that there is at least one more *** page in his one paragraph.
Lindbergh's abundance pump will be on display in September 2016 in the Science Under Glass exhibit at the National Museum of History in Washington.