Alexis Carrel

You don't have the time to do lots and lots of very delicate stitching.

And this is something that only really becomes possible nearly 100 years later at the beginning of the 20th century with a surgeon called Alexis Carrel.

He was a French surgeon.

He wins the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902, I think it was.

Clue one, the immortal chicken and the cell that learned to count.

In 1912, a French surgeon named Alexis Carrel, Nobel laureate that same year for suturing blood vessels, put a scrap of embryonic chick heart in a flask.

It kept dividing for 34 years, long after Carrel died.

The lesson seemed obvious.

Cells are immortal, so aging must come from outside the cell.

So this notion that...

So the interesting thing is that the idea, the actual term artificial life was coined in the late 19th century, early 20th century, to describe the work of scientists like Jacques Laub and Alexis Carrel, who were doing exactly the stuff that became routine in labs when I entered in the 90s.

But we still didn't have a cultural language to describe what we're experiencing.

And as a visual artist, I said that the only thing that I can do, rather than try to invent new words, which we actually did, so I myself started to use the term semi-living to describe what was 100 years earlier called artificial life.

But once you try to upscale it, once you try to make it bigger, which is the story of Frankenstein, it would escape your control.

And this is almost by definition.

Without being overly Bergson, I still believe that life is by its definition... a phenomena that escapes control otherwise it won't be life it will be a machine you know in a sense so and interesting enough just back to the mechanistic idea now I'm running away so Julian Huxley and A.G. Wells wrote a book called The Science of Life back in 1929 where they start by saying the body is a machine and it's not a metaphor But then they go and talk about the work of Alexis Carrel, who was a scientist that was really developing the whole field of tissue culture.

And they have this really beautiful description where they're saying cells and culture are like Regent Park on bank holiday, a spectacle of rather futile freedom.

He was deeply interested in biological mechanics.

Working alongside a Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon named Dr. Alexis Carrel, Charles helped invent an early perfusion pump.

I saw this in the notes, and I need you to explain this.

Why is an airplane pilot helping to invent a medical device?