Medicine: Improved Centrifuge

Last week Science (weekly) published a brief paper entitled: “A Method for Washing Corpuscles in Suspension.” The paper was signed “C. A. Lindbergh, Division of Experimental Surgery, Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.” Accompanying it was a neat drawing, minutely signed “C. A. Lindbergh 2/15/32,” of an improved centrifuge.

For several months it has been a Rockefeller Institute secret that Dr. Alexis Carrel, famed Nobel laureate, had enlisted Col. Charles Augustus Lindbergh’s aid in his researches on tissue culture and the transplantation of organs. Although Col. Lindbergh dealt with few at the Institute, peeping typists recognized the tall, fair-haired young man.

In the Lindbergh centrifuge the reservoir for blood is a conical chamber resembling an ocarina. Piercing the butt end and extending almost to the apex is a thin tube with an adjustable inlet. By means of the inlet arm the “ocarina” is fixed horizontally to a vertical reservoir of replacement fluid. As the machine rotates and produces a centrifugal force up to 650 times gravity, the corpuscles settle out of the blood. Replacement fluid flows into the “ocarina” chamber, dilutes the original fluid which flows off through a vent. In a first test of 15 minutes Col. Lindbergh demonstrated that only a fraction of 1% of the original fluid remained in the “ocarina,” that the remaining, washed corpuscles were uninjured and available for Dr. Carrel’s study.

The kidnapping of his baby interrupted Col. Lindbergh’s efforts to improve a pump which Dr. Carrel uses to drive fluids through vital organs removed from laboratory animals.

Close friends of Col. Lindbergh were not surprised by his sally into invention. They realize that he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin for a year and half (1920-Feb. 1922); that he is an active trustee of the Wilmer Foundation (eye research) and thus has contact with Johns Hopkins University. He is also a trustee of St. Luke’s International Medical Centre in Tokyo.