The French-born surgeon Alexis Carrel, doing research at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, developed techniques using tissue for cultivating the cells of warm-blooded animals. His most publicized experiment began on Jan. 17, 1912, when he successfully transplanted connective tissue cells from the heart of an embryo chick into a culture based in a test tube. The cells were kept alive for more than three decades, until April 1946. The same year the "chicken heart culture" experiment began, Carrel was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology.

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