Basile J. Luyet and the Beginnings of Transfusion Cryobiology

The first president of the Society for Cryobiology was a Roman Catholic priest born in a mountain village in Switzerland. Basile J. Luyet immigrated to the United States in 1929 with doctorates in biology and in physics and then devoted his life to studies described best by the title of his early monograph “Life and Death at Low Temperatures.” Established in the faculty at St. Louis University, he pursued studies on living matter in the cold that in midcareer led to efforts to vitrify red cells by ultrarapid cooling. As a purist who wanted to vitrify living matter without the assistance of cryoprotectant additives, he did not succeed with red cells. However, his 40 years of exploration of the biology of the cold joined physical chemistry with biology and made cryobiology into a new branch of scientific thought. A very formal man, he served both his God and his science with the dictum that “truth does not contradict truth.” His contributions are preserved in the knowledge and wisdom that he created and in the memory of the people of the Alpine village of his birth.