Free The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Page B

cells with his transplantation work, and suddenly it sounded like he’d found the fountain of youth. Headlines around the world read:
    CARREL’S NEW MIRACLE POINTS WAY TO AVERT OLD AGE! …
SCIENTISTS GROW IMMORTAL CHICKEN HEART …
DEATH PERHAPS NOT INEVITABLE

    Scientists said Carrel’s chicken-heart cells were one of the most important advances of the century, and that cell culture would uncover the secrets behind everything from eating and sex to “the music of Bach, the poems of Milton, [and] the genius of Michelangelo.” Carrel was a scientific messiah. Magazines called his culture medium “an elixir of youth” and claimed that bathing in it might make a person live forever.
    But Carrel wasn’t interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He’d later praise Hitler for the “energetic measures” he took in that direction.
    Carrel’s eccentricities fed into the media frenzy about his work. He was a stout, fast-talking Frenchman with mismatched eyes—one brown, the other blue—who rarely went out without his surgeon’s cap. He wrongly believed that light could kill cell cultures, so his laboratory looked like the photo negative of a Ku Klux Klan rally, where technicians worked in long black robes, heads covered in black hoods with small slits cut for their eyes. They sat on black stools at black tables in a shadowless room with floors, ceilings, and walls painted black. The only illumination came from a small, dust-covered skylight.
    Carrel was a mystic who believed in telepathy and clairvoyance, and thought it was possible for humans to live several centuries through the use of suspended animation. Eventually he turned his apartment into a chapel, began giving lectures on medical miracles, and told reporters he dreamed of moving to South America and becoming a dictator. Other researchers distanced themselves, criticizing him for being unscientific, but much of white America embraced his ideas and saw him as a spiritual adviser and a genius.
    Reader’s Digest
ran articles by Carrel advising women that a “husband should not be induced by an oversexed wife to perform a sexual act,” since sex drained the mind. In his best-selling book,
Man, the Unknown
, he proposed fixing what he believed was “an error” in the U.S. Constitution that promised equality for all people. “The feebleminded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law,” he wrote. “The stupid, the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right to a higher education.”
    His book sold more than two million copies and was translated into twenty languages. Thousands showed up for Carrel’s talks, sometimes requiring police in riot gear to keep order as buildings filled to capacity and fans had to be turned away.
    Through all of this, the press and public remained obsessed with Carrel’s immortal chicken heart. Each year on New Year’s Day, the
New York World Telegram
called Carrel to check on the cells; and every January 17 for decades, when Carrel and his assistants lined upin their black suits to sing “Happy Birthday” to the cells, some newspaper or magazine retold the same story again and again:
    CHICKEN HEART CELLS ALIVE TEN YEARS … FOURTEEN YEARS … TWENTY …

    Each time, the stories promised the cells would change the face of medicine, but they never did. Meanwhile, Carrel’s claims about the cells grew more fantastical.
    At one point he said the cells “would reach a volume greater than that of the solar system.”
The Literary Digest
reported that the cells could have already “covered the earth,” and a British