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Alexis Carrel ( June 28 , 1873 , Lyon, France – November 5 , 1944 ) was a French surgeon, biologist and Eugenicist , who was awarded the Nobel Prize In Physiology Or Medicine in 1912 . He was also a member of Jacques Doriot 's Parti Populaire Français (PPF), the most Collaborationist party during Vichy France . BIOGRAPHY Alexis Carrel practiced in France and the United States (University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute ). He developed new techniques in vascular sutures and was a pioneer in Transplantology and Thoracic Surgery . Alexis Carrel was also a member of Learned Societies in the US, Spain, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Vatican City, Germany, Italy and Greece and received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Belfast, Princeton , California, New York, Brown and Columbia . He was honored in 1912 with a Nobel Prize in medicine in recognition of his work on vascular suture and the transplantation of blood vessels and organs Nobelprize.org . Because of his membership to the collaborationist PPF and of his role in implementing eugenics policies during Vichy France, he was accused after the war of collaborationism, but died before the trial. CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENCE On January 17 , 1912 Carrel placed a part of chicken's embryo heart in fresh nutrient medium in a stoppered Pyrex flask of his design. Every 48 hours the tissue doubled in size and was transferred to a new flask. The tissue was still growing 20 years later, longer than a chicken's normal lifespan. During the First World War (1914-1918), Carrel and the English chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin developed the Carrel-Dakin method of treating wounds with sutures, which prior to the development of widespread Antibiotics , was a big medical progress. For this, Carrel was awarded the Légion D'honneur . He co-authored a book with Charles A. Lindbergh , ''The Culture of Organs'', and worked with Lindbergh in the mid-1930s to create the "perfusion pump," which allowed living organs to exist outside of the body during surgery. The advance is said to have been a crucial step in the development of Open-heart Surgery and Organ Transplants , and to have laid the groundwork for the Artificial Heart , which became a reality decades later. Some critics of Lindbergh claimed that Carrel overstated Lindbergh's role to gain media attention. (Wallace, ''American Axis'' p. 101) Both Lindbergh and Carrel appeared on the cover of Time Magazine on June 13 , 1938 . In 1972, the Swedish Post Office honored Carrel with a stamp that was part of its Nobel stamp series. {Link without Title} . In 1979, the Lunar Crater Carrel was named after him as a tribute to his scientific breakthroughs. RELATION TO EUGENICS AND FASCISM In 1935, Carrel published a best-selling book titled ''L'Homme, cet inconnu'' (''Man, This Unknown'') which advocated, in part, that mankind could better itself by following the guidance of an elite group intellectuals, and by implementing a regime of enforced Eugenics . Sociologist Roger Caillois quoted and paraphrased ''L'Homme, cet inconnu '' in ''The Edge of Surrealism'': " '(p)resent-day proletarians owe their status to inherited intellectual and physical defects' (sancta simplicitas). And he {Link without Title} suggests that this state of affairs should be accenetuated through appropriate measures, so as to correlate social and biological inequalities more precisely. Society would then be directed by a hereditary aristocracy composed of descendants from the Crusaders, the heroes of the Revolution, the great criminals, the financial and industrial magnates" (p. 360). Carrel advocated the use of . Quoted in Reggiani, p. 339 . Carrel also wrote: "(t)he conditioning of petty criminals with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. Those who have murdered, robbed while armed with automatic pistol or machine gun, kidnapped children, despoiled the poor of their savings, misled the public in important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gasses. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts." (quoted in Szasz) . In 1937, Carrel joined , 1946 law instauring Occupational Medicine . It worked on Demographics (Robert Gessain, Paul Vincent, Jean Bourgeois), on Nutrition (Jean Sutter), on habitation (Jean Merlet) and on the first Opinion Poll s (Jean Stoetzel). "The foundation was chartered as a public institution under the joint supervision of the ministries of finance and public health. It was given financial autonomy and a budget of forty million francs—roughly one franc per inhabitant—a true luxury considering the burdens imposed by the German Occupation on the nation’s resources. By way of comparison, the whole Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) was given a budget of fifty million francs." (Reggiani) {Link without Title} According to Gwen Terrenoire, writing in ''Eugenics in France (1913-1941) : a review of research findings'', "The foundation was a pluridisciplinary centre that employed around 300 researchers (mainly statisticians, psychologists, physicians) from the summer of 1942 to the end of the autumn of 1944. After the Alfred Sauvy , who coined the expression " Third World ". Others joined Robert Debré 's " Institut National D'hygiène " (National Hygiene Institute), which later became the INSERM . Scholars including Lucien Bonnafé , Patrick Tort and Max Lafont have accused Carrel of responsibility for the execution of thousands of mentally ill or impaired patients under Vichy. They argue that this policy was inspired by Carrel's advocacy of eugenics. . Carrel's association with Vichy, and the harshness of his advocacy for eugenics, has led to his descent from fame to obscurity. In recent years, Jean-Marie Le Pen , leader of the far-right Front National party ("National Front"), has become an advocate for Carrel, referring to him as "the first Environmentalist , or, if you will, the first modern ecologist, precisely because he committed himself to defining the relationships of natural harmony." Jean-Marie Le Pen , ''L'Espoir'' 133-134, cited in Golson, Fascism's Return) . His writings on eugenics are studied "avidly in the training camps of the National Front". (Lucien Bonnafé and Patrick Tort, ''L'Homme, cet inconnu? Alexis Carrel, Jean-Marie le Pen et les chambres a gaz'' {Link without Title} ) . In the 1990's, the attention the National Front's support brought to Carrel's Fascist associations and advocacy for forced Euthanasia created a series of controversies with respect to streets and institutions named in honor of Carrel. Over 20 French cities and towns, including Paris, renamed streets previously named for Carrel. The controversy came to a head in Lyon, his birhtplace, where the medicine faculty of the university Lyon I- Claude Bernard was named in his honor. '' Lyon Libération '' questioned the wisdom of this. In response to this, "(i)n May 1995, the Palais des Congrès of Lyon hosted a conference on Carrel and Scientific Racism at which several of the participants accused the inquiry commission of Whitewashing the controversial scientist. In early 1996, after five years of embarrassing publicity, the governing board of the University of Lyon decided to rename its school of medicine after René Laënnec , inventor of the Stethoscope ." {Link without Title} In the United States as well as in France, the 1990's were not kind to Carrel's reputation. In an interview for ALLEGED INFLUENCE ON THE RISE OF ISLAMISM Carrel's eugenic ideas are alleged to have influenced the thought of such early advocates of Islamism as Ali Shariati and Muslim Brotherhood propagandist Sayyed Qutb . Qutb, one of the key philosophers in the Muslim Brotherhood movement after the death of its founder in 1949, cites Carrel a lot. (For more on the Carrel / Islamist connection, see Tariq Ali , ''Clash of Fundamentalisms'', p. 274; Youssef Choueiri , ''Islamic Fundamentalism'' (London 1990) and Rudolph Walther , ''Die seltsamen Lehren des Doktor Carrel'', '' Die Zeit '' 31.07.2003 Nr.32) . This influence is ironic, given that Carrel himself was a devoted Roman Catholic and Christian mystic. He mentions Islam in ''Man, the Unknown'' just once, and not in a complimentary manner. He notes of Western Christian civilization, that, "(a)t the cost of immense efforts, we succeeded in thrusting back the sleep of Islamism." Throughout his book, he refers to Western civilization as "Christendom." Moreover, he believed in the racial superiority of northern Europeans. These ideas would have been anathema to Qutb. REFERENCES SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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