Lindbergh and the biological sciences (a personal reminiscence)

In 1929 Charles Lindbergh became interested in the development of a heart-bypass pump to enable open-heart surgery, and was introduced to Alexis Carrel. Carrel persuaded Lindbergh to work instead on a perfusion system for the culture of whole organs outside the body, and by 1934-when I met Lindbergh in Copenhagen-he already had developed a pump with floating glass valves that allowed precise regulation of perfusion pressure and rate. I joined Lindbergh and Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute to work on organ culture, using the pump. My subsequent contact with Lindbergh came at Columbia, where I experimented with hemocyanin as a blood substitute, and (much later) at Huntington Medical Research Institutes, where I found his pump useful in the study of cholesterol uptake by arteries.