The Immortalists: Charles Lindburgh, Dr Alexis Carrel & their daring quest to live forever - Tapa dura

For all the attention lavished on Charles Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr Alexis Carrel. Together this oddest of couples – one a brilliant surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies – embarked on a secret quest to achieve immortality. It began in 1930 in the Rockerfeller Institute for Medical Research, a haven created by the world’s richest man so that medical investigators could pursue their dreams freed from the demands of clinical practice. For Carrel, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1932 for pioneering organ transplants, conquering death was the aim. But not for everyone – only for a select few. To help him Carrel needed a mechanical genius. Might that genius be the handsome pilot who astonished the world in May 1927 by flying alone across the Atlantic in a single-engine airplane he designed himself? The Immortalists is a captivating study of medical innovation, the fallibility of science and two adventurous minds. The Immortalists is a captivating study of medical innovation, the fallibility of science and two adventurous minds. David M Friedman has written for Esquire, GQ, and Rolling Stone, and has been a reporter for New York Newsday and the Philadelphia Daily News. His first book was published in more than a dozen countries.