Lindbergh’s death terror drove his biomedical immortality work

Evidence

In 1930, Charles Lindbergh, internationally renowned for his 1927 transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, approached Carrel in hopes of finding a way to repair or replace his sister-in-law’s faulty heart valve. Lindbergh was an expert mechanic and, like Descartes, he saw the human body as a machine that could, in principle, be maintained indefinitely by repairing or replacing faulty parts. Lindbergh also had a personal stake in these matters, for as a child, he had been preoccupied with death: “When God first appeared in my memory, he was linked with death,” the aviator recalled. “If God is so good, why did he make you die? Why should he not let you live forever? There was nothing good about death; it was terrible.” — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 377

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to terror management theory’s core claim (from this book’s earlier chapters) that death anxiety drives achievement and ambition.
• CANDY: The child Lindbergh arguing with God about death is a striking, shareable quote.