Alexis Carrel, a French scientist at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, cut a small fragment of the heart of an eighteen-day old chick fetus and grew it in liquid culture. “[T]he fragment pulsated regularly for a few days and grew extensively,” he noted. “After the first washing […] the culture grew again very extensively.” When he removed and recultivated a piece of it, he found it still capable of pulsating: in March, nearly three months after having removed it from the chick’s heart, “it was [still] pulsating at a rate that varied between 60 and 84 per minute […].” Ultimately, “on March
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