A Brief History of Disembodied Dog Heads

Did Soviet scientists actually keep a disembodied dog head alive back in the 1940s? Did those crazed Stalinist Frankensteins then follow up that stunt by surgically creating a two headed dog in 1954? (That is, if "two-headed" is accurate - it's more like two heads, six legs and one-and-a-half torsi.)

Sorry, I just wanted to use the word "torsi."

And forget the Soviets - what about the monkey brain that a Cleveland surgeon transplanted from one primate to another? Are these all Internet hoaxes, or the only known evidence of a subject too taboo to be taken seriously - the research into head and brain transplants that's been going on for decades?

I wish I had definitive answers for you - I don't. But I'm more inclined towards believing that these experiments actually took place than when I first stumbled onto this weird medical sub-culture. After starting off as a skeptic, I've come to believe that organisms have indeed been revived. Heads have been lopped off. Brains have been perfused. Cephalic members transplanted. Glucose permeated in isolated canine craniums. The works.

This all started a few weeks back, while browsing through the Prelinger archives. I came across the movie Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, which purports to show a 1940 Soviet experiment in which a dog's head was kept "alive" after being removed from its body. [download video, 49 meg mp4 file]. If you haven't seen this yet, be careful - it's not for the squeamish. And I might as well say upfront that I'm against the removal and reanimation of heads, even for scientific or culinary purposes. Fascinating though it may be, it amounts to torture. It's one thing to keep a dog's lungs pumping outside of it's deceased body, and quite another to maintain consciousness and pain receptiveness in a disembodied head. Maybe the imagined horror of this is what has kept this research relegated to the status of science fiction and hoaxology for so long.

But that didn't stop me from wanting to find out if this was a hoax or not. When you read the comments on the Prelinger page, you'll see that about half the people who saw the movie felt it was a hoax and half were inclined to believe it. I wanted to find out for myself. Surely, if this film was a hoax, it would be relatively easy to demonstrate that, if somebody hadn't done so already. But rather than uncovering any evidence of a hoax, my hours of hunting led to dozens of medical papers and abstracts which backed the film up, as well as uncovering more cases of head transplant experimentation in the US and Russia, not to mention a crew of  scientists that would make Mary Shelley proud.

First, download and watch the movie, since the puzzle starts there. At first glance, Experiments in the Revival of  Organisms comes off as a piece of  World War Two era Soviet propaganda. The arteries and blood vessels leading in and out of the dog-head aren't made visible to the viewer, and the narration that accompanies the film (by the pro-Communist British Biologist J.B.S. Haldane) leaves much to be desired in terms of medical accuracy, so dumbed down was his description of the experiment. The film supposedly documents experiments performed by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy in the U.S.S.R. It was premiered in November, 1943, when the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship and the American-Soviet Medical Society showed it to a thousand American scientists in New York City. Here are articles of that 1943 showing from The New York Times (download pdf file) and Time Magazine.

So what about this Bryukhonenko character - did he even exist? He did indeed. He invented the autojector, the artificial circulation machine shown in the film, and he was a well known figure in the field of Human Biology in the 30's and 40's. The National Institute of Health website has indices of papers referencing his work, including this 1969 article which describes (in Russian) some of the same work shown in this film. While I wasn't able to find any papers written by Bryukhonenko himself, I also didn't search using Cyrillic fonts, or go to a medical library to dig up the papers which are references on the National Institute of Health's website.

Despite his significant contributions to science and medicine, Bryukhonenko will forever be remembered as the dog-head doctor, due mostly to his portrayal as the disembodied head of  Professor Dowell in Alexander Beliaev's science-fiction novel, "The Head of Professor Dowell," which was later made into the movie "Professor Dowell's Testament."

Bryukhonenko wasn't alone in his fascination with bringing dead things back to life. As one might expect from a country that lost 6 million people to the Nazi's during World War Two, the science of resuscitation was something of a scientific and medical obsession The Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, where Bryukhonenko's dog experiments took place, was founded in 1936 by Vladimir Negovsky, a Soviet doctor who spent much of the Forties working on the front lines of the war with resuscitation teams, working to revive Soviet soldiers who were bleeding to death, and in some cases, had already bled to death. Negovsky's work prior to the war involved experiments with dogs, and Bryukhonenko was but one of many Soviet scientists working in this field.

In 1961, Negovsky defined his peculiar scientific specialty as "Reanimatology." From his obituary:

"Negovsky was able to develop reanimatology as a new medical discipline in the Soviet Union and trained and mentored several generations of "reanimatologists" in the communist countries, for whom anesthesiology, out-of-hospital emergency care and other acute clinical practices, became sub-specialties of reanimatology. Every hospital in Russia and former Soviet Republics has a Department of Reanimatology lead mostly by Negovsky's trainees."

Bryukhonenko also had protégés of his own, most notably Vladimir Demikhov, who in 1954 reportedly grafted a second head onto a living dog. You can see clips from his experiments here. The best view of Demikhov's creature is in the sixth clip (marked number "005").

It's hard to out-weird a two headed dog, but the odd gentleman who narrates Experiments in the Revival of Organisms has a bizarre back story all his own. JBS Haldane was an influential Scottish Geneticist and Biologist who staked his substantial reputation on Bryukhonenko's work. In this film, Haldane claims to have seen these experiments with his own eyes.

Haldane got his start in genetics by breeding guinea pigs for his scientist father and acting as one himself from time to time. From the Stephen Jay Gould Archive entry on Haldane:

"In one childhood episode, the elder Haldane made him recite a long Shakespearean speech in the depths of a mine shaft to demonstrate the effects of rising gases. When the gasping boy finally fell to the floor, he found he could breathe the air there, a lesson that served him well in the trenches of World War I. A physically courageous 200-pounder, Haldane continued the family tradition of using his own body for dangerous tests. In one experiment, he drank quantities of hydrochloric acid to observe its effects on muscle action; another time he exercised to exhaustion while measuring carbon dioxide pressures in his lungs." His penchant for self-experimentation stayed with him. In his decompression chamber experiments, he and his volunteers suffered perforated eardrums, but, as Haldane stated in his book What is Life, "The drum generally heals up; and if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment."

Haldane was a real renaissance guy; he spoke many languages, wrote extensively on history and politics, and made important research contributions to chemistry, biology, mathematics and genetics. He reshaped modern evolutionary biology with his studies in population genetics.  His interest in genetics and biology influenced his 1924 book and essay, Daedalus, or Science and The Future, which imagined a day when people would control their own evolution through ectogenesis - the care and feeding of test tube babies.

Daedalus created quite a sensation in 1924, and Bertrand Russell was so appalled by its implications that he wrote his own book, Icarus or the Future of Science, in response. Another writer and friend of Haldane's named Aldous Huxley was also inspired enough by Daedalus and Russell's response to it that he based his own 1932 novel Brave New World on the questions raised by Haldane and Russell.

Ten years earlier, Huxley had used his friend Haldane as the inspiration for the character Shearwater in his novel Antic Hay (1923), as "the biologist too absorbed in his experiments to notice his friends bedding his wife."

Haldane was a committed Marxist for much of his career, which is why we find him narrating a film distributed by The National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. But by the end of World War Two, Haldane disavowed Marxism and moved to India to continue his studies and writing until his death in 1964.

Maybe you're thinking that there could be something to all this head removal business back in the U.S.S.R, but it couldn't possibly happen in the USA, with our long history of mostly ethical medical practices.

Think again.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Dr. David Gilboe of the University of Wisconsin removed the brains of over 40 dogs, removing their blood to suffocate them, then reviving them by pumping the blood back in, not unlike Bryukhonenko's experiments in the 30's and 40's. Measuring the activity of the dog brains with an electroencephalograph, Gilboe concluded that it was possible to keep the dog brains functioning for approximately two hours outside of the body. Unlike Bryukhonenko, Gilboe wasn't studying the revival of organisms - he was studying the chemistry of brain metabolism during the process of suffocation and recovery. And what better way to do it than by removing dozens of dog brains. An article by Gilboe appeared in April, 1973 in The Journal of Biological Chemistry, and a pdf of it can be downloaded here, or you can view an abstract of the article as a web page here.

An index of a 1964 paper by Gilboe and two other scientists entitled "Extracorporeal Perfusion of the Isolated Head of a Dog" can be viewed here, but you will need to register to read the index.

Gilboe stayed true to the Soviet tradition of dog head removal, but another Midwestern scientist started with dogs and then moved up the evolutionary ladder. In the 1960's a Cleveland brain surgeon named Robert J White attached an isolated dog brain to a second dog to see if he could get some action out of the newly homeless brain. The experiment was a success, if you consider a dog with two working brains "successful," which White did. But this experiment was merely a warm up for White's most notorious experiment, in which he transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another. When the newly re-headed monkey tried to bite off the finger of a researcher, White's entire team reportedly cheered. You can see the index of this experiment, entitled "Cephalic Exchange Transplantation In The Monkey" here.

White was on a roll, and was all set to try the concept out on Homo Sapiens, when something or someone stepped in and put an end to it. But not before he had somehow dabbled with a few human brains:

"We discovered that you can keep a human brain going without any circulation," he says. "It's dead for all practical purpose -- for over an hour -- then bring it back to life. If you want something that's a little bit science fiction, that is it, man, that is it!

Perhaps this is why White was later appointed as an adviser to Pope John Paul II's Committee on Bioethics. Perhaps the Pope didn't know about Craig Vetovitz, a paralyzed biker buddy of Whites who is patiently waiting and hoping for Doctor White to remove his head and graft it onto a working body. Or maybe the Pope did know about all that, and that's why he's on the committee. It all gets very
confusing. You can read more about White here.

Perhaps tales like this are the reason that head and brain transplanation isn't taken seriously. As soon as you get into the realm of people shopping around for other people's bodies to carry their heads around, it gets a little hard to stop giggling. But it's no laughing matter for some. (And no, I'm not referring to Walt Disney, whose head, contrary to popular belief, was never put on ice awaiting a better day and body.)

There is one company out there called Brain Trans for which this is serious business. I'm afraid I can't tell you where Brain Trans is located, because the nature of their work violates various ethical and medical laws, some of which are still honored internationally. But I can tell you that they are located somewhere in Asia, they have a lot of brains on  ice, and they have an even bigger choice of human bodies. Visit their body gallery!

But don't ask too many questions. As they say on their site, "Because of the ethical aspects we do not discuss how and were we getting new human bodies for brain transplantation. (sic)"

It doesn't take long to realize that the Brain Trans site is one of the funniest websites ever, even if the fraudulent purposes for which it was created are genuine. And it's the sites like Brain Trans, and the urban legends like the one about Walt Disney's brain and the dozens of Science Fiction books and movies about living disembodied heads that has kept the science of brain and head transplantation tucked away in the realm of rumor and fiction. As long as the horror of such research outstrips our fascination with it, legitimate versions of companies like Brain Trans will never be realized and brain transplantation will be another medical sub-specialty that's gone to the dogs.

Comments

[bartelby]

Spelling errors on a website for a company that claims to be able to transplant brains do not inspire the confidence one would hope for.

[vanjulio]

Oh yes Ling Ling! That is one of the best ones from that book... What was it called? National Lampoon's Big Book of True Facts?

One of my close friends in high school let me borrow this for a long time. Wow I'd nearly forgotten how funny it was!

[bartelby]

Also if you wanted to do more research in scientific journals of the Soviet era you could contact Eastview. I am pretty sure they are Eastview.com on the web. I call them every now and again for articles where I work. They are quite nice being in Minnesota and all. Best place for North Korean article requests.

[kotya]

"The isolated head even reacts to light and to sound"

Complete bullshit. In order for a head to move in this way it must be connected to a body. E.g. for your finger to play a note on the piano it depends on completely connected systems. Our little doggie would not be able to manage motion other than up or down jaws and up or down eyes in this video if it were real.

[kotya]

Before the pile on - I'm referring to eyelids; the most external system.

[cody]

there's mention of these experiments in the great book 'stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers' by mary roach.

[Dale Hazelton]

Cool film, sort of a marriage of "Metropolis" and "Our Mister Sun".......I find it highly suspect that doggy can be back to normal "and even grow" in a few days. Aren't cellular decay and rigor mortis and all those good things that accompany the stench of death irreversable? So what was the point of all this anyway, to develop artificial organs (good) or to create an army of Russian soldiers you could never really kill (bad)?

I remember a movie I saw when I was a kid...this scientist kills the gentle townfolk and has a bank of limbs on a wall in his lab for reanimation later. In the big end scene they come back to life, but grab him and choke him to death. Bad karma, really. I wish I could remember the name of the movie. It made quite an impression on a 10 year old.

[housepig]

when I was working at the US Patent Office, my favorite patent was #4,666,425, "Device for Perfusing an Animal or Human Head" - you can read the abstract here, but to look at the images, you might need some funky plugins.

[Station Manager Ken]

"Complete bullshit. In order for a head to move in this way it must be connected to a body."

I spoke to a professor of veterinary medicine about that, and he said that it would be possible for the dog head to move the way it's shown in the film, if enough of the neck and shoulder muscles were still connected to the head. Admittedly, in the film, it's impossible to see what's going on - exactly how much of the head/neck/shoulder was removed.

-ken

[Clayton Counts]

In 1997, I had the good fortune of conducting an extensive interview with Robert White. It should be noted that this man has contributed a great deal to the field of neurophysiology. In fact, his research is the primary basis of the modern surgical practice of cooling the brain insitu. It simply gives the surgeons a greater deal of time to work with the brain. Moreover, Dr. White was, in spite of all disbelief, quite able to chart responses off the visual cortex using microelectrode arrays affixed to the fovea centralis; that is, the central point at which the optic nerve meets the retina. I have read a good number of his more than three hundred technical papers, many of which have been published in esteemed medical journals. But what impressed me most about Dr. White was his desire to do good for humankind. Aside from being an ethics adviser to the Pope, he was also a Knight of the Vatican, and he testified at Senate subcommittee hearings on partial birth abortion. But most astoundingly, the work he was doing in the area of brain transplants (or, as he refers to them, "full body transplants") has an extraordinarily practical side which is rarely spoken of; that of extending the lives of persons. His assessment (one which I tend to agree with) is that a donor body could mean the difference between life and death for a person whose own body is diseased. He was quick to note that, not so long ago, there was a consensus among scientists that heart transplants shouldn't be done. Indeed, most scientists believed that they couldn't. But it is a dangerous trend, I believe, to mischaracterize Dr. White and pioneers like him as modern day Frankensteins; this is how he has been portrayed in countless articles and on television, yet he has contributed immeasurably to the art of medical investigation. At a dinner party recently, a second year medical student told me that brain transplants were impossible. He said, "it can't be done, and it never will." Needless to say, I'd heard that one before.

[louis sherman]

There is nothing special about this film, it just shows the early experiments in health care that is practiced every day in most countries. This can save your life for a few moments while they take care of you, or it can keep you alive as a vegetable for years. Common stuff, really common, but they don't cut off your head.

[paul]

> As one might expect from a country that lost 6 million people to the Nazi's during World War Two

27 million.

[Mary]

My mother worked for Dr. White at the time and was present during that surgery. She was the one in charge of training the monkey to press the lever on the shock-elicited escape/avoidance apparatus.

[Enrico Poli]

Another good paper (by White) along the lines of the soviet movie is this one:

"Isolation of the Monkey Brain: In vitro Preparation and Maintenance"
(Science, 1961)

Abstract: Sustained viability of the primate brain, as a totally isolated organ preparation, was achieved by utilizing an extracorporeal (compatible donor) circulation...

You can get the abstract here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/141/3585/1060

The guy who was assigned the patent metioned above has explained his goal ("it will give The Dis Corporation the right to stop or slow down discorporation research in America") in this Whole Earth Review's article:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1510/is_n59/ai_6484062/print

Bye :)

[Doug]

For those interested in the subject the scientist involved in the experiements published his doctoral thesis on the subject in 1943.

http://www.erc.edu/index.php/newsItem/en/nid=136/

[Deepak Modak]

Brain and head transplants may soon be possible

Hello,

Dr. Robert J. White, now retired, from Cleveland, Ohio has already performed countless successful head transfer experiments on monkeys [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1263758.stm ], and has perfected methods by which the human brain can be isolated from its blood supply for an hour or so. With the recent breakthroughs in spinal cord research, brain transplants may now be possible.

http://www.clevescene.com/issues/1999-12-09/putre.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_transplant
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bennun/interviews/drwhite.html

http://64.78.63.75/samples/05PYS0404PlotnikIntrotoPsych7ch3.pdf
(pg 64)

http://www.ebookmall.com/ebook/66923-ebook.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/archive/science_nature/brain.shtml
http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9708/fn.9708.html
http://www2.lakelandcc.edu/nora/events/iuser/news/newsmore.asp?ID=917
http://www.universityneurosurgeons.org/residency/the_faculty.htm

[brian]

i have been under anasthesia and have frightening recollections of the experience. I can only imagine how frightened those dogs and monkies were (are) during this kind of experiment. It is no wonder that aliens haunt our dreams, performing experiments on us. We are as callous as they are.

[Bob]

Sorry skeptics, but this video is real. The research learned from such experiments led to the development of the first Heart/Lung machines, by John Gibbons, which are now used regularly for all types of cardiac and great vessel surgeries. I am a cardiovascular perfusionist and use these machines to do incredible things to the human body. Most striking is a procedure called circulatory arrest whereby we cool a patient's body to temperatures approaching 18 degrees celsius, induce a barbituate coma turning off the brain, arrest the heart with a potassium solution and lastly shut down the patient's circulation and exsanguinate (or remove the blood) from the body. The patient is effectively dead and hypothermically preserved. This state can last for suprisingly long periods of time before the technique is reversed and the patient is brought back to life. Check out Perfusion.Com for more information about the medical profession and science behind it.

[scoot]

I've been meaning to respond to this article since it first came out, and now I see that someone else has already mentioned Mary Roach's excellent, entertaining, and downright disturbing book, "Stiff," which has a whole chapter about decapitation and reanimation. She traces the origins of canine (and human) head-juggling to the French, as long ago as the 1790s (!), in the heydey of the guillotine, and gives a great many details all the way up to Robert White's experiments in the 1960s and beyond. She's also very funny in describing all this, and I, among many others, can highly recommend this book. Since I'm an overly sentimental dog-lover, I still haven't managed to watch all of the Prelinger video, but in the interest of science, I suppose I have to now...

[Virginia]

If you or anyone else is interested in 'weird medicine' such as transplanting dog heads and monkey brains and even human-based medical experiments, an excellent book to read would be Mary Roach's 'Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers"
Not only is it a really entertaining read for a nonfiction science book, it proves that yes, the Soviets DID reanimate dog heads, yes, American researchers DID graft a monkey's brain into anothe rmonkey's abdomen (she even INTERVEIWS one of the last living scientists involved with those experiments).
Totally weird but totally 100% true.

[Ralph]

I have in my possesion a LIFE magazine which I cant recall from which year but it is from the 40s and I have it in a box with about 30 other old Life magazines that someone gave to me. Anyway, the article regarding the Soviet experiment on the dog is there and when I read it I was really saddened at the thought of the poor dog´s fate. But it is true, that really did happen.

[Pony]

Humans are no better than the "moster" or "alien"-type figures that are portrayed in numerous movies that depict gross and gruesome experimentation on people. Stop portraying humanity as victims all the time when it is far from the case!!! Looking at all this frankenstein-type science makes me ashamed to be a "human" being.

[Boni]

I am writing a novel that deals with this subject and I have been searching for a way to contact Dr. Robert White... would you know how he can be reached?

[Boni]

I am writing a novel that deals with this subject and I have been searching for a way to contact Dr. Robert White... would you know how he can be reached?

[yoyoyoy]

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