Immortal Cells

"But Carrel set out to prove them wrong. At age thirty-nine he'd already invented the first technique for suturing blood vessels together, and had used it to perform the first coronary bypass and develop methods for transplanting organs. He hoped someday to grow whole organs in the laboratory, filling massive vaults with lungs, livers, kidneys, and tissues he could ship through the mail for transplantation. As a first step, he'd tried to grow a sliver of chicken-heart tissue in culture, and to everyone's amazement, it worked. Those heart cells kept beating as if they were still in the chicken's body.....Scientists said that Carrel's chicken-heart cells were one of the most important advances of the century, and that cell culture would uncover the secrets behind everything from eating and sex to 'the music of Bach, the poems of Milton, [and] the genius of Michelangelo.' Carrel was a scientific messiah. Magazines called his culture medium 'and elixir of youth' and claimed that bathing in it might make a person live forever.
   But Carrel wasn't interested in immortality for the masses. He was a eugenicist: organ transplantation and life extension were ways to preserve what he saw as the superior white race, which he believed was being polluted by less intelligent and inferior stock, namely the poor, uneducated, and nonwhite. He dreamed of never-ending life for those he deemed worthy, and death or forced sterilization for everyone else. He'd later praise Hitler for the 'energetic measures' he took in that direction.
   The real chicken-heart cells didn't fare so well. In fact, it turned out that the original cells had probably never survived long at all. Years after Carrel died awaiting trial for collaborating with the Nazis, scientist Leonard Hayflick grew suspicious of the chicken heart. No one had ever been able to replicate Carrel's work, and the cells seemed to defy a basic rule of biology: that normal cells can only divide a finite number of times before dying. Hayflick investigated them and concluded that the original chicken-heart cells had actually died soon after Carrel put them in the culture, and that, intentionally or not, Carrel had been putting new cells in the culture dishes each time he 'fed' them using and 'embryo juice' he made from ground tissues. But no one could test the theory, because two years after Carrel's death, his assistant unceremoniously threw the famous chicken-heart cells in the trash."

  It's very concerning that masses of people believed a figure such as Carrel. Even though he was considered "a scientific messiah," he also praised Hitler...He was a man who believed in the same kind of "superior race"idea that Hitler believed in, and wanted to use his scientific achievements to accomplish this. He did not want this discovery to help other people, he wanted it to fuel his own sick ideal world.
  This passage made me think about how susceptable people are when believing things that they hear. People often either never check their sources, or believe sources that seem to be superior because of their titles. Carrel was believed undoubtably because of his occupation as a scientist. Background research is rarely ever done concerning rumors and ideas.
  This could also lead to the discussion of social media. The popularity of social networking sites has exploded recently, starting with MySpace and FaceBook, and gradually evolving into Twitter and Instagram. According to mediabistro.com, there are 250 million active users on Twitter as of 2012. This is not nearly as much as FaceBook's 750 million active users, but the number of users on Twitter is steadily rising over time. I could post a rumor on Twitter right this very moment, and I'm sure I would be recieving text messages shortly after concerning my tweet. The number of users on these social networking sites makes it allarmingly quick for information to travel from one side of the world to another. This has many pros, such as updates on wars overseas, but could also pose many cons, especially if the information is not true. Will the rapid spread of social networking sites help our nation, or destroy it?