In 1931, the year before his son’s sensational kidnapping, the celebrity aviator began working with Alexis Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute on a perfusion pump which would allow the cultivation of whole organs in vitro. His pump maintained a sterile, pulsating circulation of fluid through excised organs, and enabled Carrel to keep organs such as the thyroid gland and kidney alive and functioning. It was a forerunner of the modern heart pump. (See also No. 856.1). Reprinted in Carrel and Lindbergh, The culture of organs, New York, Paul Hoeber, 1938.

Remarkably, Lindbergh maintained a long term interest in this project, authoring another paper as late as 1966:
"An apparatus for the pusating perfusion of whole organs," Cryobiology, 3, 252-260. Co-authored with V.P. Perry, T. I. Malinin, and G.H. Mouer.