Lindbergh and Carrel met not long after Lindbergh's "victory lap" around the world, which followed his historic solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927. Fueled by their shared goal to find a scientific path to life without death, they spent five years in Carrel's laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, where they secretly built a machine that could keep organs alive outside the bodies that created them. This device was the forerunner of today's artificial heart and heart-lung machine.