Alexis Carrell

Marie Joseph Auguste Carrel-Billiard (Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, France, June 28, 1873-Paris, November 5, 1944), known as Alexis Carrel, was a French biologist, physician, scientific researcher, eugenicist and writer. For his contributions to the medical sciences he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912.

In France, he was honored with the Order of the Legion of Honor.) He was a member of the Accademia de Lincei (Pontifical Academy of Sciences). In May 1902, he was an eyewitness to an extraordinary healing at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, which marked the beginning of a progressive change in his life, which led him from skepticism to faith. Today he is considered one of the most famous converts of Lourdes.

Julius H. Comroe, professor emeritus at the Institute for Cardiovascular Research at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote:

Carrel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912, and did not win it for some dark and esoteric research, but “in recognition of his work on vascular suture, and the transplant of blood vessels and organs”. Between 1901 and 1910, Alexis Carrel, performing experiments with animals, performed all actions and developed all the techniques known today in vascular surgery (...).

Its beginnings

Alexis Carrel was born in Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon, in the Rhône department, on June 28, 1873. His ancestors had held significant positions in the service of Lyon and its institutions over the previous three centuries. His family was moderately solvent. His father, Alexis Carrel Billiard, was a cloth manufacturer who, in 1871, at the age of twenty-six, married Anne-Marie Ricard. The first child of the couple was named Auguste, but he changed his name to Alexis when his father died. Alexis was the eldest of three siblings and, at the time of his father's death, he was only five years old. Thereafter, the family's financial prospects changed rapidly.

Marie François Sadi Carnot, President of the French Republic.

At the age of seventeen, she graduated from St. Joseph's College (Lyon) and was faced with the need to choose a career. He considered surgery, scientific research, caring for patients. Almost without hesitation, he decided to enter the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Lyon, even though there was no family background in that discipline. In 1889 he obtained a Bachelor of Letters, and in 1890 that of Surgery. He completed the courses and practices, and in three years he passed the final exams. Later, he was accepted as an extern (2nd out of 57 applicants) on October 27, 1893 and spent the next two years serving at the Hospital de la Cruz Roja and at the Antiguaille Hospital. Subsequently, he did military service for 1 year as a medical assistant in the Chasseurs Alpins mountain troop unit. Finally, he developed a 5-year internship in different hospitals in Lyon, mainly the Hotel Dieu .

He was still a young medical practitioner when French President Marie François Sadi Carnot was assassinated by an Italian anarchist in Lyon in June 1894. The anarchist's knife had severed a major artery, so the presidente died after less than two days of agony without the best surgeons being able to avoid the fatal outcome. In those days, the suturing of a large blood vessel was still an issue with no safe solution. The episode left a deep impression on the young Carrel, who decided to solve the problem. He insisted that Carnot's life could have been saved if surgeons had known how to suture vessels, just as they suture other tissue. From his internship, he dedicated himself to experimental vascular surgery, specializing at the same University. In 1900, Carrel was a medical doctor.

Scientific development

From the beginning, Alexis Carrel showed great interest in the possibility of reconstituting arteries, work that he began to develop in animals.

In 1902, already a doctor and assistant in the Department of Anatomy, he published a paper in the scientific journal Lyon Medical. This scientific paper made history, initiating the most outstanding period of his career and catapulting him to fame a decade later, as Carrel sensed it would. Two weeks later he found himself on the train that took Marie Bailly, a young woman afflicted with late-stage tuberculous peritonitis, to Lourdes. There, Carrel was a qualified witness to Bailly's extraordinary healing. The precise facts are available in "Dossier 54" and became known as the "Bailly Case." On the other hand, the spiritual experience that shook Carrel in the following five days was described by him in a novel way in a manuscript that was published in 1948, under the title Le voyage de Lourdes, suivi de fragments de journal et de meditations, four years after her death in November 1944. In 1950, it was published in an English translation as The Voyage to Lourdes. Carrel, though puzzled and stunned, accurately reported his observations to the medical community in Lyon. He was then attacked by the clergy, who found him too skeptical, and by his own medical colleagues, who found him too gullible and "mystical." A surgeon colleague told him that he would never pass his surgery exam.

Alexis Carrell in 1912, when he was beaten with the Nobel Prize.

Alexis Carrel, in the lab.

Alexis Carrel among Columbia University students on June 4, 1913. It appears in the center, with the face in front of the camera. In the distribution of diplomas, Carrel received an honorary degree.

Bitter and upset, Alexis Carrel left France for the New World in May 1904, heading first for Canada. In early July 1904, he presented a paper in Montreal on vascular anastomosis to the Second North American French-Language Medical Congress. In the audience was Dr. Carl Beck, a renowned Chicago surgeon who was convinced that Carrel should belong to that city. In November of that year, Carrel was offered two positions: one at the University of Illinois with Beck, and another in the Department of Physiology at the University of Chicago. He accepted the second option, probably because G. N. Stewart, a renowned cardiovascular physiologist, was director of that Department. At that time, Carrel was interested in experiences such as that of the American surgeon Rudolph Matas in the treatment of aneurysms. Thus, Carrel emigrated to the United States in November 1904.

His work continued at the University of Chicago (1904-1906) and at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where he remained —except for brief periods— until 1938, when he returned to Europe.

Carrel's research was fundamentally concerned with experimental surgery and the transplantation of intact tissues and organs. Until then, the vascular structures were sutured and bone or precious metal cannulas were used. Alexis Carrel devised a new suture system that avoided directly joining the vascular edges. To do this, he made cuts at the ends of the glasses and turned them over. He then used paraffin suture material. With this method he was able to avoid postoperative bleeding and the formation of blood clots. By suturing the ends outward or reversed, he managed to ensure that there were no loose threads inside that would favor the subsequent formation of thrombi.

Carrel and Guthrie were the first to observe that when a vein was used to replace an arterial segment in the same individual, the vein assumed artery characteristics whereas, when an artery replaced a vein, the arterial wall thinned. and assumed the characteristics of a vein.

In 1910, he described in an article all his advances made with this new vascular suture system. With his technique, Carrel was able to join blood vessels barely one millimeter in diameter. Encouraged by his findings, he dedicated his research to vascular transplants: taking a portion of a vessel, he was able to use it elsewhere on the patient himself.

Among Carrel's contributions to surgery, there are autografts (autotransplants) in animals, with which he obtained numerous successes, although there were rejections in the so-called homografts (homotransplants) of organs from different individuals belonging to the same species. Ear, thyroid, kidney and spleen transplants are also highlighted, as well as his achievements in preserving blood vessels for transplantation that would avoid waiting for a possible donor (for this, he used cold storage or cold storage). ).

Christiaan Neethling Barnard is credited as the first to transplant the heart from one human being to another, in late 1967. But the idea was not new. Carrel and Guthrie had done this in a dog as early as 1905. Carrel described heart and lung transplantation in 1907.

During World War I he devised, together with British chemist Henry Dakin, Carrel-Dakin solution, a type of antiseptic used successfully to clean and combat infection in open war wounds.

His works in experimental vascular surgery were published in the most famous journals: Journal of the American Medical Association (18 articles), Journal of Experimental Medicine (25 articles), Science (7 articles), Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics (5 articles), Annals of Surgery (3 articles), Transactions of the American Surgical Society (3 articles), Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital and British Medical Journal.

Awards and distinctions

Alexis Carrel in 1912, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Alexis Carrell and his wife, in 1914.

In 1912 Alexis Carrel received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "in recognition of his work on vascular suturing, and transplantation of blood vessels and organs." The comments produced by the scientific media after Alexis Carrel was awarded the Nobel Prize continued to be remarkable:

And there is a new advance in the surgery of the blood vessels that is, perhaps, even more surprising. Carrel has shown that a portion of the artery can be kept in a cold chamber for several days or even weeks before the transplant and, even so, remain alive. Moreover, although as a general rule, the tissue of an animal will not grow in the body of another animal of a different species, Carrel has found that these portions of blood vessels of dogs can be transplanted from a frigorific chamber successfully in the bodies of cats. None that has followed with interest these new advances in surgery may doubt that they contain immense possibilities, and the application of the methods learned in animals to the human being cannot take long.

The Lancet, editorial of 19 October 1912

Carrel was honored with membership of learned societies in the US, Spain, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Vatican City, Germany, Italy, and Greece, and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Belfast, Princeton, California, New York, Brown, and Columbia. He received the Order of the Legion of Honor from France, and the Order of Leopold from Belgium. He was Grand Commander in the Swedish Order of the North Star, and the recipient of other decorations in Spain, Serbia, Great Britain and from the Holy See.

Alexis Carrel and Lourdes

Fifteen years before the birth of Alexis Carrel, on February 11, 1858, and for six months, a very poor teenager named Bernadette Soubirous testified that she had received the revelations of the Virgin Mary in the invocation of the Immaculate Conception in the small Masse-Vieille cave (today called Massabielle), on the outskirts of Lourdes (France). Bernadette's subsequent death on April 16, 1879 and her canonization on December 8, 1933, both events that occurred during Carrel's lifetime, together with extraordinary signs that took place there, made Lourdes one of the main Catholic pilgrimage destinations in the world. The healing of Marie Bailly in Lourdes was accredited by Alexis Carrel himself, after her active participation with the patient, which led to the crisis of Carrel's skepticism.

Poshumous awards

• In 1972, the Swedish postal office honored Alexis Carrel with a postal stamp that was part of his « Nobel postal stamp series».
• In 1979, the lunar crater "Carrel" was named as a tribute to his scientific advances.
• In February 2002, the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston (USA), established the Lindbergh-Carrel Award, as part of the celebrations for the centenary of Charles Lindbergh's birthday, with whom Carrel developed scientific collaborations.