Carrel, Alexis

SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

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b. 28 June 1873 Lyon, France

d. 5 November 1944 Paris, France

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French surgeon and experimental biologist, pioneer of blood-vessel repair techniques and "in vitro" tissue culture.

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He entered the university of Lyon as a medical student in 1890, but although attached to the Chasseurs Alpins as a surgeon, and to the department of anatomy, he did not qualify as a doctor until 1900. Soon after, he developed an interest in the repair of blood vessels and reported his first successes in 1902.

In consequence of local political difficulties he left for Paris, and after a further year, in 1904, he became Assistant in Physiology at the University of Chicago. His further development of vascular surgical advances led to organ transplants in animals. By 1908 he had moved to in vitro cultivation of heart tissue from a chick embryo (a culture of which, in the care of an assistant, outlived him).

He returned to service in the French Army in 1914 and was associated with Dakin in developing the irrigation treatment of infected wounds. In 1930 he initiated a programme aimed at the cultivation of whole organs, and with the assistance of a pump developed by Charles Lindbergh he succeeded in maintaining thyroid gland and kidney tissue for some weeks. Something of a mystic, Carrel returned to France in 1939 to head his Institute for the Study of Human Problems.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology 1912.

Bibliography

1911, "The surgery of blood vessels", Johns Hopkins Bulletin.

1911, "Rejuvenation of cultures of tissues", Journal of the American Medical Association.

1938, The Culture of Organs, New York. 1938, Man the Unknown, New York.

Further Reading

R.Soupault, 1952, Alexis Carrel. 1873–1944, Paris (contains full bibliography of papers).

MG