One Summer: America, 1927

America on its maiden flight almost exactly a year earlier. Bennett was either extraordinarily unlucky or not fully recovered because upon reaching Canada he collapsed with pneumonia. At news of this, Lindbergh rushed to the Rockefeller Institute to fetch a vial of serum, and flew with it through blizzard and gale to bring it to Bennett’s bedside. Alas, it turned out that the serum was the wrong kind, and Bennett died. He was thirty-seven years old.
    Through his exposure to the Rockefeller Institute, Lindbergh met Alexis Carrel, who would provide him with an enduring friendship and years of bad advice. ‘Nobody in Charles Lindbergh’s adulthood affected his thinking more deeply than Alexis Carrel,’ wrote A. Scott Berg in his acclaimed 1998 biography of Lindbergh. A native of Lyons, Carrel was one of the most gifted surgeons of his day. As a medical student in France, he became celebrated for extraordinary feats of dexterity – tying two pieces of catgut together with the use of just two fingers or sewing five hundred stitches into a single sheet of cigarette paper. These were more than just amusing stunts, for his abilities with needle and thread led Carrel to devise helpful new methods for suturing. He invented a way of splicing arteries that kept the interior surface smooth and therefore clot-free, and in so doing saved countless lives. In 1906, he took up a position at the Rockefeller Institute, and six years later was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine – the first person in America to be so honoured. In the course of a long career, Carrel also performed the first coronary bypass operation (on a dog) and did pioneering work that helped pave the way for organ transplants and tissue grafts later.
    He proved, however, to be a bundle of odd notions. He was convinced that sunlight was a bad thing, and maintained that the world’s most backward civilizations were always where the tropical glare was brightest. He insisted that everything in his operating theatres, from gowns to dressings, be black. He flatly refused to engage with anyone who didn’t please him at first glance.
    Carrel became especially noted for his chilling views on eugenics. He believed that people who were defective or backwardshould be ‘euthenistically disposed of in gas chambers’. Such people, in his view, should be prepared to give up their lives for the greater good of humanity. ‘The concept of sacrifice, of its absolute social necessity, must be introduced into the mind of modern man,’ Carrel maintained.
    Carrel outlined his views bluntly, if not always entirely coherently, in a best-selling book of 1935 called Man the Unknown . There he asked:
     
Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? 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 gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts.
     
    The solution to the earth’s problems, Carrel maintained, was to create a ‘High Council of Doctors’ (which, he hinted, he stood ready to lead) whose chief role would be to ensure that the planet’s affairs always remained in the control of ‘the dominant white races’.
    Carrel’s views for a time enjoyed a surprisingly respectful following. When he spoke at the New York Academy of Medicine, 5,000 people jammed into a lecture hall designed to hold 700. Lindbergh was particularly enthralled. ‘There seemed to be no limit to the breadth and penetration of his thought,’ he marvelled.
    Through Carrel, Lindbergh became interested in trying to make a machine that could keep organs alive artificially during surgery, and at length devised an instrument called a perfusion pump – ‘a spirally coiled glass tube, resembling a hot water heater’, as Time magazine described it. It was basically a kind of sophisticated filter. Carrel revelled in the publicity that Lindbergh’s involvement brought – it coincided very conveniently with thepublication of Man the Unknown – and persuaded journalists that the pump represented a historic breakthrough in medical science. Time featured the two men on its cover, with the apparatus proudly displayed between them. Lindbergh’s perfusion pump was unquestionably a nifty device, but it is fair to say that it