The strain in Alexis Carrel’s laboratory had two lives. One was in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, where it was a strain of connective tissue cells, counted by passages and measured by the width of a ring. The other was in the newspapers, where it was the chicken heart, and had a birthday. This piece follows the second life, because it is the one most people met, and because it shows what a yearly question with one possible answer does to a fact.

1912: the heart in the test tube

Carrel’s paper of May 1912 reported, among much else, that a fragment of an embryo chick’s heart had gone on beating in a drop of plasma for the better part of three months. When the Nobel Prize was announced in October the New York Times ran a long article, “Dr. Carrel’s Miracles in Surgery,” which quoted the paper at length and said, accurately, that he had kept cultures of chick heart cells for 120 days. Other papers took the shorter road. The Rural Weekly of St Paul, Minnesota, headed its story on October 24, 1912: “He keeps hearts alive in test tube and wins $39,000 Nobel Prize.” Scientific American that year carried an article called “The ‘immortality’ of tissues,” with the word already in quotation marks. In January 1913, when Carrel published that extracts of embryo could speed the growth of tissue in glass and remarked that a tenfold acceleration would let a broken leg mend in days, the Philadelphia Star told its readers that “Carrel’s incomprehensible compound will bring joy to many” and that “while the good doctor doesn’t come right out and say so, he leads us to believe that in future we will be quite exempt from all bodily injuries.”

1921: the nurses

The films made it a spectacle. Alessandro Fabbri, a wealthy New York amateur of microscopy and radio, photographed the cells through a microscope frame by frame, and on April 23, 1921, he, Carrel and Ebeling showed the result to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. The New-York Tribune of the next morning is the first full public account of how the strain was kept, and it is nearly right. “A doctor and two nurses look after the ‘chicken heart,’” it began, and explained that the thing “is not a heart at all, but the cell proliferation from a small fragment removed from the heart of a chicken embryo in 1912.” It described the incubator at 103 degrees Fahrenheit, the surgical operation every forty-eight hours, the white-clad attendants and the rubber-gloved surgeon who “cuts it in two, severing the new cell growth from the old,” and it quoted Carrel on what would happen if nothing were cut away: “a sufficient number of cells to form a ball larger than the earth.” The New York Herald the same day added that the culture was in its 1,500th generation, “counting each bisection as one,” and that it would go on “unless one of the developments of the next few years be the knowledge that there is a term to the life and vigor of cell proliferation.” On June 12 the World, under the headline “Scientists may now watch living connective tissue reproduce its ultimate cells,” found a better image than a ball: a rooster “big enough today to cross the Atlantic in a stride; it would also be so monstrous that when perched on this mundane sphere, the World, it would look like a weathercock.”

1922 to 1925: the tenth birthday

January 17, 1922, was the day the strain became older than a hen, which was the test the critics had set, and the New York Herald marked it with a column. “Ten years ago to-day Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute isolated a fragment of tissue from the heart of an embryonic chicken. The tissue kept on growing; it has kept on growing ever since.” The paper had read Ebeling’s report of 1919 and reproduced its recipe, the forty-five seconds in Ringer’s solution, the equal volumes of plasma and extract, the hens not more than two years old. It reported that the men themselves would not speculate about human life. And it gave the verdict that would be repeated for twenty-five years: “It is, so far as those who are watching and nourishing it can see, immortal.”

Two years later the New-York Tribune gave the twelfth birthday an article, “Isolated tissue holds life 12 years in test,” that Witkowski judged “remarkably accurate and comprehensive” and probably written by someone who knew the field. The same spring a syndicated photograph with a caption went round the country’s smaller papers; the Bismarck Tribune of May 21, 1924, told North Dakota that “a piece of chicken’s heart has been kept beating for twelve years” by Carrel, and put his laboratory at Johns Hopkins. In November 1925 Time quoted an English chemist, Arthur Green, back from New York: “Dr. Carrel introduces immortality in a physical sense. It is there before your eyes, and so long as this tissue is nurtured and irrigated it will live. It cannot die. Its growth is so enormous that it doubles itself every twenty-four hours and if it had not been pared down each day since the experiment began it would now be a colossal monster overspreading all New York.” Time corrected him in its own voice: “Dr. Carrel’s chickenheart-tissue is not a chicken. It is in effect a group of single cells living individually in an ideal environment without mutual interdependence.”

1932 to 1939: the man and the book

In the 1930s the strain became a line in articles about its owner. In January 1932 Time, introducing Carrel as the man “who has kept a piece of chicken heart growing for 19 years,” reported his verdict that “the process of aging remains irreversible,” and that no operation of Steinach or Voronoff had ever rejuvenated anyone; it relayed the laboratory’s own test of biological age, in which “a spickle of flesh” put into culture medium grows for a time, and the time and speed of its growth “indicate the ‘residual energy’ of that bit of flesh.” In 1935 Carrel published Man, the Unknown, a mixture of physiology, mysticism and politics that sold in hundreds of thousands, and in it he wrote that cell colonies kept in a constant medium “never grow old,” that those “obtained from a heart fragment removed in January, 1912, from a chick embryo, are growing as actively to-day as twenty-three years ago,” and that “in fact, they are immortal.” Time’s profile that September, which was mostly about the book and about Charles Lindbergh’s glass pump, gave the strain a sentence: without the paring, “the whole earth might now (theoretically) be covered with a film of soft flesh.” A Collier’s article on the pump in 1938 said that “occasional trimming kept it from literally growing out of the laboratory.” In April 1939, when the Institute retired him, Time wrote: “For 27 years he has kept a scrap of chicken heart alive and growing. Every few days the heart has to be trimmed, for it spreads so rapidly that if left alone it would fill the laboratory in a year.”

1937: the play

On the night of Wednesday, March 10, 1937, from half past eleven to midnight on WMAQ in Chicago, the radio series Lights Out broadcast a seven-minute play by Arch Oboler called “Chicken Heart.” A scientist has kept a chicken’s heart beating in a test tube for seventeen months; the tube breaks; the heart grows, with an insistent beat under everything, across the laboratory, the town, the country and the planet, through water, fire and bombs, until the scientist and a pilot flee in an aeroplane whose engines fail, and the play ends with a wet splat and a gong. Oboler had been reading about Carrel. The play was repeated for years and issued on a record in 1962, and in 1966 Bill Cosby built a routine around it on his album Wonderfulness: the boy who heard it alone in the dark and set fire to the sofa. The legend that Ebeling spent his 1942 article denying, a pulsating heart in a jar that had to be cut back or it would swallow the building, had by then been performed to the whole country as a horror story, and it was closer to what most people believed about the Rockefeller Institute than anything in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

1940 to 1946: the obituaries

The New York World-Telegram had, by Newsweek’s account, asked after the strain on January 17 of every year since it began. On January 17, 1940, with Carrel gone to France and his laboratories shut, it reported “That chicken heart of Dr. Carrel’s is dead at 28,” and on January 18, “Cancel that obituary on the chicken heart”: the cells were alive in a private laboratory the Institute would not name. Leonard Hayflick, who was eleven that winter, remembered the paper’s annual story, and in 1998 he put it in a lecture: “The New York World Telegram inquired after the health of the cells at the beginning of each New Year. They even published a premature obituary of the cells in 1940.” In January 1942 Ebeling, now at the Lederle Laboratories at Pearl River, wrote the strain’s thirtieth-birthday article himself, in Scientific American, under the title “Dr. Carrel’s Immortal Chicken Heart: Present Authentic Facts about This Oft-Falsified Scientific Celebrity,” listing the “fantastic legends” he wished to correct and reporting that in drug testing the strain “has already thus ‘earned its keep’ over and over again.” It was the last birthday article. Corner’s history records that the strain was discarded on April 26, 1946, and that the Herald Tribune reported the fact on October 2 of that year. No January story was needed after that, and none appeared.

What it comes to

For twenty-eight Januaries a newspaper asked a laboratory one question, and the question had only one answer that could be printed, because the other answer would have ended the story. “Still alive” was the whole of the public’s instrument, and it could not distinguish a strain that had never died from one that had been quietly restarted, or a strain fed on juice from one fed on cells. The press got the details wrong in every direction, a beating heart, a jar, daily paring, Johns Hopkins, and the one thing it got right, that the cells were cut back and fed every other day, was the thing that mattered and the thing nobody thought to ask about. A number that is only ever reported, never checked, is not a measurement. It is an anniversary.

Sources

• The New-York Tribune of April 24, 1921, the New York Herald of April 24, 1921 and January 17, 1922, and the Bismarck Tribune of May 21, 1924, in the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America; public domain. loc.gov, loc.gov, loc.gov, loc.gov
• Time, November 30, 1925; January 4, 1932; September 16, 1935; April 24, 1939. In copyright; quoted briefly. time.com, time.com, time.com, content.time.com
• Jan A. Witkowski, “Dr. Carrel’s Immortal Cells,” Medical History 24 (1980), for the New York Times of October 13, 1912, the Rural Weekly, the Philadelphia Star, the World of June 12, 1921, the Tribune of January 6, 1924, Collier’s, the World-Telegram headlines of January 17 and 18, 1940, Newsweek of January 29, 1940, Ebeling’s article of 1942, and the Herald Tribune of October 2, 1946, all quoted here at second hand from his footnotes. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Alexis Carrel, Man, the Unknown, Harper, 1935, page 173, read in archive.org’s search-inside text. archive.org
• Leonard Hayflick, “A Brief History of the Mortality and Immortality of Cultured Cells,” Keio Journal of Medicine 47 (1998), 174–182. jstage.jst.go.jp
• Margaret A. Brucia, “Alessandro Fabbri, the Rockefeller Institute, and the Immortal Chicken Heart,” Gotham Center for New York City History, 2017. gothamcenter.org
• Neely Tucker, “Halloween Heartthrob: The ‘Chicken Heart’ that Gobbled Up the Globe,” Library of Congress blog, October 22, 2024, for the broadcast’s title sheet, plot and afterlife. blogs.loc.gov