Every Day Is Special: June 28 - Happy Birthday, Alexis Carrel

June 28 - Happy Birthday, Alexis Carrel

Posted on June 28, 2021

This is an update of my post published June 28, 2010:

Alexis Carrel was a French scientist who was born on this day in 1873. He moved to the U.S. in 1905, and in 1912 he won a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for developing a way to suture blood vessels. (Suture means to reconnect, join, sew back together.)

Carrel worked for a decade on experimental animals and managed to develop every technique used in vascular (blood vessel) surgery today.

He also worked on keeping tissue alive after it is removed from a living organism—this technology really helps with transplants—and even succeeded in keeping alive tissue from the heart of a chicken embryo for 35 years!

The yucky part of Carrel's life was during World War II. Carrel may have liked and supported the Nazis. You might remember that, under Hitler, Germany attacked and took over France; during the time when the Nazis occupied France, it was called "Vichy France." Of course, many French people worked for the resistance and tried to hinder or even stop the Nazis in little and big ways. However, some French people went along with the Nazis and willingly implemented their awful-terrible-no-good-very-bad ideas. These Nazi enablers were later called collaborators, and some were shamed or exiled or executed, while others were tried in court and, if found guilty of collaboration, served time in prison.

Carrel was accused of collaboration but died (at age 71) before his trial.