Recollections of an Eyewitness

RECOLLECTIONS OF AN EYEWITNESS RICHARDJ. BING* I have often wondered at the apparent separation between a person's daily life and his artistic or scientific creation. It seems as if the creative impulse arises as a separate trait. We expect a creative artist to show some outstanding signs of genius or talent, but this is not always the case. Shakespeare is a good example. According to the few biographical notes in existence, William Shakespeare, the man, was not at all idiosyncratic . According to Bloom he was an amiable writer, pleasant, open, neighborly, willing, gentle, free of manner, someone with whom you could have a relaxed drink; all agreed that he was good-natured and unassuming. The creator of the great plays and characters was a person totally separate from his creative life. It is as if he could invoke his enormous creativity at will, to have it emerge from his daily existence. In artists and scientists the manifestations of the creative impulse are often obscured by the impact ofdaily life and the routine ofdaily events. This applies to the lives of the three men discussed here, men who made outstanding contributions to medicine and science: aviator Charles Lindbergh, physiologist Homer W. Smith, and surgeon A. Blalock. The account which follows is subjective and makes no attempt to present complete biographies. Rather, it is the story of an eyewitness, influenced by personal contact evoking emotions which are tempered by time and sweetened by memory. Charles A. Lindbergh Lindbergh's life is familiar to most: his birth in Detroit, his youth in Little Falls, Minnesota, his involvement in the unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Senate by his father, his barnstorming days, his flight to Paris in 1929 followed by his son's kidnapping, his self-imposed exile, his controversial participation in political movements, and finally his inter- *Huntington Medical Research Institutes, 99 North El Molino Avenue, Pasadena, California 91101.© 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/95/3901-0943$01.00 Perspectives in Biology andMedicine, 39, 2 ¦ Winter 1996 | 227 est in environmental causes. But few know of his scientific interests. I worked with Charles Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel on the culture of whole organs in the early 1930s. For both of us the year at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University) in New York was a remarkable experience. For Lindbergh it offered a view of the biological sciences. For me, a young investigator, it was a heady time in the Valhalla of science. I met Lindbergh in 1934, when he and Carrel, the experimental surgeon and Nobel Prize winner, attended the World Congress of Biology in Copenhagen to demonstrate their method for the culture of organs. I was then a 25-year-old research fellow at the Carlsberg Biological Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, learning cell cultures previously introduced by Harrison and later amplified by Carrel and others. I helped Lindbergh and Carrel in setting up the perfusion system, and when the question of introducing their method into Denmark was discussed, I was chosen to learn the technique at the Rockefeller Institute and to introduce it at the Carlsberg Institute. Carrel obtained a grant for me from the Rockefeller Foundation, and after a stopover to visit the Lindberghs at Seven Oaks in Kent, England, I arrived in New York in 1936 to work at the Rockefeller Institute and learn the new method. After a year, and upon the recommendation of Carrel, I applied for first-year residency in surgery at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons under A. O. Whipple, Chairman of the Department of Surgery , and was accepted. But before assuming this position, I had to return to Copenhagen to introduce the culture of whole organs at the Carlsberg Institute. With the war clouds gathering over Europe, I returned to New York as soon as possible. I spent one year of my residency at Columbia University under Whipple; Lindbergh was helpful in setting up the perfusion system. Whipple and Lindbergh got along well. Both had in common a directness of approach to difficult problems. Whipple's surgical treatment of cancer of the pancreas, referred to as the "Whipple procedure," shows the mettle of the man...