The Great Events by Famous Historians

On January 17, 1912, experiments were commenced to determine whether these effects could be overcome. The observations were on the heart and blood-vessels, artificially grown, of the chicken fetus. These growths were put into a salt solution for a few minutes at different periods of their growth, and then placed in a new plasmatic medium. It was found that by following this method, the tissues could be made to live indefinitely. When an animal is in the early stages of its development, the growth of its tissues is necessarily greater as it matures, there being steady diminution after a certain age until the growth altogether ceases, and the size of the animal is determined. But it was found by subjecting these artificial growths to washings in salt solution that the mass was fifteen times greater at the end of than at the commencement of the third month, showing that they do not grow old at all! In the artificial growth the problem of senility and death is solved.

It was the announcement of this "permanent life of tissues" that caused such a furor in Paris last summer, and several eminent scientists to demand ocular demonstration, because "the discovery, if true, constituted the greatest scientific advance of a generation."

The following summary of this interesting and vitally important and epoch-making work of Carrel is translated from an article published in Paris recently by Professor Pozzi, who witnessed the experiments:

"Carrel found that the pulsations of a fragment of heart, which had diminished in number and intensity or ceased, could be revived to the normal state by a washing and a passage. In a secondary culture, two fragments of heart, separated by a free space, beat as strongly and regularly. The larger fragment contracted 92 times a minute and the smaller 120 times. For three days, the number and intensity of the pulsations varied slightly. On the fourth day, the pulsations diminished considerably in intensity. The large fragment beat 40 times a minute and the little fragment 90 times. The culture was washed and placed in a new medium. An hour and a half after, the pulsations had become very strong. The large fragment contracted 120 times a minute and the small fragment 160 times. At the same time the fragments grew rapidly. At the end of eight hours they were united and formed a mass of which all the parts beat synchronically."

Experiments to date seem to establish that the connective tissue, at any rate, is "immortal."

From this research, it is possible to arrive at certain logical conclusions, which, however, it remains for the future to confirm. One, and the most important, is that the normal circulation of the blood does not succeed in freeing all the waste products of the tissues, and that this is the cause of senility and death. Were science to find some way to wash the tissues in the living organism as they have been washed in these cultures, man's life might be indefinitely prolonged.

R. LEGENDRE

The Nobel prize in medicine for 1912 has just been awarded to Dr.

Alexis Carrel, a Frenchman, of Lyon, now employed at the Rockefeller

Institute of New York, for his entire work relating to the suture of

vessels and the transplantation of organs.

The remarkable results obtained in these fields by various experimenters, of whom Carrel is most widely known, and also the wonderful applications made of them by certain surgeons have already been widely published.

The journals have frequently spoken lately of "cultures" of tissues detached from the organism to which they belonged; and some of them, exaggerating the results already obtained, have stated that it is now possible to make living tissues grow and increase when so detached.

Having given these subjects much study I wish to state here what has already been done and what we may hope to accomplish. As a matter of fact we do not yet know how to construct living cells; the forms obtained with mineral substances by Errera, Stephane Leduc, and others, have only a remote resemblance to those of life; neither do we know how to prevent death; but yet it is interesting to know that it is possible to prolong for some time the life of organs, tissues, and cells after they have been removed from the organism.