russian 2 headed dog experiment

How Vladimir Demikhov Actually Made A Two-Headed Dog

Though it's hard to believe that soviet scientist vladimir demikhov actually made a two-headed dog, these surreal photos are the proof..

Calling Soviet doctor Vladimir Demikhov a mad scientist may be undercutting his contributions to the world of medicine, but some of his radical experiments certainly fit the title. Case in point — though it may seem like myth, propaganda, or a case of photoshopped history — in the 1950s, Vladimir Demikhov actually created a two-headed dog.

Vladimir Demikhov’s Pioneering Career In Medical Research

Even before creating his two-headed dog, Vladimir Demikhov was a pioneer in transplantology — he even coined the term. After transplanting a number of vital organs between dogs (his favorite experimental subjects) he aimed, amid much controversy, to see if he could take things further: He wanted to graft the head of one dog onto the body of another, fully intact dog.

Bettmann/Getty Images Laboratory assistant Maria Tretekova lends a hand as noted Russian surgeon Dr. Vladimir Demikhov feeds the two-headed dog he created by grafting the head and two front legs of a puppy onto the back of the neck of a full-grown German shepherd.

Starting in 1954, Demikhov and his associates set about performing this surgery 23 times, with varying degrees of success. The 24th time, in 1959, was not the most successful attempt, but it was the most publicized, with an article and accompanying photos appearing in LIFE Magazine . This is thus the two-headed dog that history remembers most.

For this surgery, Demikhov chose two subjects, one a large stray German Shepherd that Demikhov named Brodyaga (Russian for “tramp”) and a smaller dog named Shavka. Brodyaga would be the host dog, and Shavka would supply the secondary head and neck.

With Shavka’s lower body amputated below the forelegs (keeping her own heart and lungs connected until the last minute before the transplant) and a corresponding incision in Brodyaga’s neck where Shavka’s upper body would attach, the rest was mainly vascular reconstruction — other than attaching the vertebrae of the dogs with plastic strings, that is.

Bettmann/Getty Images Vladimir Demikhov’s lab assistants feed the two-headed dog made from Brodyaga and Shavka after the surgery.

Thanks to the team’s wealth of experience, the operation took a mere three and a half hours. After the two-headed dog was resuscitated, both heads could hear, see, smell, and swallow. Although Shavka’s transplanted head could drink, she was not connected to Brodyaga’s stomach. Anything she drank flowed through an external tube and onto the floor.

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The sad fate of demikhov’s two-headed dog.

In the end, this two-headed dog lived only for just four days. Had a vein in the neck area not accidentally gotten damaged, it may have lived even longer than Demikhov’s longest-living two-headed dog, which survived 29 days.

Even setting aside the deaths of the canine subjects, the moral implications of Demikhov’s experiment are tricky. This head transplantation, unlike some of his other advancements in the field of transplantology, had no real-life applications. Yet there were certainly very real implications for the dogs.

Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images Vladimir Demikhov with his two-headed dog.

However, as outrageous as this all sounds, a head transplant wasn’t even that radical for the 1950s. As early as 1908, the French surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel and his partner, American physiologist Dr. Charles Guthrie, attempted the same experiment. Their dual-headed canine initially showed promise, but degraded quickly and was euthanized within a few hours.

Today, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero believes that head transplants will be a reality in the very near future. He is closely involved in the first human attempt, which is slated to occur in China, where there are fewer medical and ethical regulations. Canavero said last year , “They have a tight schedule but the team in China say they are ready to do it.”

Nevertheless, most everyone else in the medical community believes that a transplant of this kind is still science-fiction fodder. But in the not-too-distant future, such a surgery may actually become a reality.

After this look at how Vladimir Demikhov created a two-headed dog, see some astounding photos of two-headed animals found in nature . Then, read up on Laika, the Cold War-era Soviet dog who was sent into space and became the first animal to orbit the Earth .

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A dog with two heads: How a Soviet doctor pioneered organ transplantation against the odds

"The son of a peasant, Demikhov initially trained as a mechanic and repairman before enrolling in the biology department at Moscow State University. Here he thrived."

On April 11, 1959 the Associated Press circulated a message from Moscow: Russian doctors had transplanted a puppy’s head to the neck of a German shepherd and the two-headed beast was in good health. However, the American public - surprised by the sensational news - had not yet seen the shocking images. Only later would the photos of the experiment become public.

The pictures (which are, fair to say, objectively repulsive) document the ground-breaking experiment of a Soviet scientist leading the way in organ transplantation. By the time the news of the operation hit America in 1959, the surgeon - Vladimir Demikhov, 43 at the time - had already been performing transplants on dogs for five years.

None of the previously operated dogs has lived for more than six days. Pirat (the Russian word for Pirate) - the German shepherd operated on April 11 - proved an exception, however. The two-headed dog lived for three weeks while reacting to stimuli around it!

"By the time the news of the operation hit America in 1959, the surgeon - Vladimir Demikhov, 43 at the time - had already been performing transplants on dogs for five years."

A heart for two hours

The son of a peasant, Demikhov initially trained as a mechanic and repairman before enrolling in the biology department at Moscow State University. Here he thrived.

Demikhov performed his first ground-breaking experiment less than two years into his studies. In 1937, he sent shockwaves through Russia’s medical community when he created an artificial heart and successfully implanted it into a dog. The dog lived for two hours after surgery, pushing the borders of organ transplantation, a science scarcely studied in 1937 but vital for today’s medical world.

Demikhov’s later and bolder experiments attracted attention from across the Atlantic, as well as from Europe. Scientists in the West mostly believed organ transplantation was not possible because the patient’s immune system would reject the new addition.

Likely, this general skepticism was the main reason why the work of an American professor at Washington University - Dr. Charles C. Guthrie - who performed an experiment similar to Demikhov’s in 1908, was not followed up by his American colleagues.

Everything changed though when news about Demikhov’s success reached the U.S. In the 1960s, American doctors traveled to the Soviet Union to learn about innovative techniques used by Soviet surgeons. One of the key innovations, later adopted by the U.S., Canada, and Japan, was the use of staples to compress veins and arteries during operations, which dramatically reduced surgery time.

By 1962, a consensus of the American medical community had shifted and U.S. doctors, who saw Demikhov at work, gradually warmed to the possibility of successfully transplanting human organs.

Concise obituary

In 1965 Demikhov attended a medical conference where he proposed the creation of a bank where human organs could be stored for the needs of surgeons. The futuristic proposal, unthinkable at the time, sparked much anger among Soviet academics who criticized Demikhov and demanded the closure of his laboratory.

This took a toll on his health, his wife later recalled, and despite the fact Demikhov remained a director at the Russian Health Ministry Republican Center for Human Reproduction, his research efforts in organ transplantation declined, and his international fame wilted.

The pioneering scientist died in a small apartment on the outskirts of Moscow in 1998 at the age of 82. The true value of his experiments, which were observed with suspicion by the Soviet medical elites, were acknowledged by the Russian state at the end of his life. Demikhov was awarded the Order for Services for the Fatherland in 1998, the year of his death. However, the countless lives subsequently saved by organ transplants are his real legacy.  

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Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov’s Two-Headed Dog

In 1955, at a meeting of the Moscow Surgical Society, a sensational exhibit was presented to the assembled guests. On the platform close to the audience, a large white dog was brought in. The dog looked happy, cheerfully wagging its tail, and unintimated by the large crowd of eager guests in front of him. He seemed particularly unconcerned by the unnatural appendage protruding from the side of his neck.

Just a few days before the meet, the dog had undergone a major surgery during which the Soviet scientist Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov had attached to the side of his neck a second head, acquired from a small brown-haired puppy. Both the hound and the decapitated head of the puppy were alive and reacting to stimuli. And even as the surgeons watched, the puppy's head gave the ear of its host a nasty bite. The white head snarled.

Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov’s demonstration sent shockwaves through Russia’s medical community, but this was not the first time our Soviet Dr. Frankenstein had ruffled feathers in his quest for medical breakthroughs. In 1937, at the age of only 21 and still a student, the young Vladimir had shocked his professors by creating the first artificial heart, which he successfully implanted into a dog. The dog survived for five hours. After graduation, Demikhov continued his experimental research, eventually performing successful heart and lung transplants, and later, liver and kidney transplantation on dogs and cats. Some of his patients survived for a month. His experiments with bypassing the coronary arteries were more satisfying. Four of the dogs survived for as long as 2 years. One dog operated in 1953 survived for 7 years.

Encouraged by his successes, Demikhov began moving to bolder experiments. In 1954, he performed his most controversial experimental operation, where he grafted the head and forelegs of a small puppy to the neck of a large adult dog.

“When the multiple dog regained consciousness after the operation, the puppy's head woke up and yawned. The big head gave it a puzzled look and tried at first to shake it off,” reports Time.

The puppy's head kept its own personality. Though handicapped by having almost no body of its own, it was as playful as any other puppy. It growled and snarled with mock fierceness or licked the hand that caressed it. The host-dog was bored by all this, but soon became reconciled to the unaccountable puppy that had sprouted out of its neck. When it got thirsty, the puppy got thirsty and lapped milk eagerly. When the laboratory grew hot, both host-dog and puppy put out their tongues and panted to cool off. After six days of life together, both heads and the common body died.

Demikhov created many such medical monstrosities. With time and experience, the survival rate of the animals improved, until one hybrid dog survived for 29 days.

When news of his pioneering surgeries spread throughout the western world, it raised many eyebrows and even more ethical questions regarding the acceptance of such procedures and their true medical need. But Demikhov could clearly see the future.

“The final goal of our experiments was to make transplantation of the heart and other organs in humans possible,” Demikhov wrote in a monograph.

Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov

In 1960, Demikhov published his book ‘ Experimental Transplantation of Vital Organs’ where he described in details the different approaches and surgical techniques. Soon afterwards the book was translated and published in several western countries, and for a long time was the only monograph in the field of transplantation of organs and tissues.

In his Landmarks in Cardiac Surgery , author Stephen Westaby recalled that in 1962, when an article on Demikhov’s head transplantations was published in the Cape Argos newspaper, Doctor Christiaan Barnard, a young South African cardiac surgeon at the Groote Schuur Hospital, remarked that “anything those Russians can do, we can do, too.” That same afternoon, he reproduced the experiment by transplanting the head of a dog onto another dog. The dog survived for several days.

Christiaan Barnard would later perform the world’s first successful transplantation of a human heart from a person who had just died from a head injury.

In 1997, a year before Vladimir Demikhov’s death, Dr. Barnard wrote in a letter to one his colleagues, crediting his own success to Demikhov's earlier experiments.

“He was certainly a remarkable man, having done all the research before extracorporeal circulation. I have always maintained that if there is a father of heart and lung transplantation then Demikhov certainly deserves this title,” Barnard wrote.

Despite his contribution to medical science, very few recognized Demikhov, especially by his own country. The true value of his experiments were acknowledged by the Russian state only at the end of his life, when he was awarded the “Order for Services for the Fatherland” in 1998, the year of his death.

Demikhov performing experimental surgery in Leipzig.

The last dog head transplant performed by Vladimir Demikhov on January 13, 1959 in East Germany.

References: # Simon Matskeplishvili, https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/38/46/3406/4706202 # Igor E. Konstantinov, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2763473/ # Russia Beyond, https://www.rbth.com/science-and-tech/326540-dog-heads-demikhov-soviet-medicine # Time, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,891156,00.html

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The history of the two-headed dog experiment

VLADIMIR DEMIKHOV WAS a pioneering surgeon.

Without his contributions to science and medicine, organ transplant and coronary surgery may not be as developed as it is today – a fact that is not well known because his papers were written in Russian while living on the bleaker side of the Cold War and through World War II.

Some of his peers noticed though.

Christiaan Neethling Barnard, the South African cardiac surgeon who performed the world’s first successful human-to-human heart transplant, said in 1997: “I have always maintained that if there is a father of heart and lung transplantation then Demikhov certainly deserves this title”.

Gazing back at Demikhov’s early experiments that led to many successes in the operation rooms, however, can offer an uncomfortable experience.

He was the first person to perform a successful coronary artery bypass operation on a warm-blooded creature but, yet, became more famous for his two-headed dog.

In fact, many of his  experiments were carried out on dogs. He transplanted lungs and hearts, took organs out to see how long dogs would survive and watched their reactions to the new organs.

By far the most unusual experiments and surgeries included the transplantation of the head or half the body. In 1948, he wrote about the “surgical combination of two animals with the creation of a single circulation”.

In this image, Demikhov shows photographers how he stitched the head and upper body of a two-month-old puppy onto the neck of a four-year-old mongrel Mukhtar.

The work was carried out in the reanimation lab of the A.A.Bogomolets Physiology Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

In 1968, Demikhov transplanted another puppy’s head onto the neck of another dog. The creatures survived for 38 days. Its bodies were then stuffed and in 1988 given to Riga’s Museum of History of Medicine.

For the past two years, it has travelled around Germany for exhibitions. It returned to Latvia earlier this week.

(Warning: Graphic images that some viewers may find too disturbing)

(YouTube Credit: RussianFootageCom )

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How Vladimir Demikhov Actually Made A Two-Headed Dog

Table of Contents:

After transplanting a number of vital organs between dogs, his favorite experimental subjects, he aimed amid much controversy to see if he could take things further; he wanted to graft the head of one dog onto the body of another fully intact dog. Starting in 1954, Demikhov and his associates set about performing this surgery 23 times with varying degrees of success. The 24th time, in 1959, was not the most successful, but it was the most publicized, with an article and accompanying photos appearing in Life magazine. Demikhov chose two topics. one large straight German shepherd that Demikhov named Brodiaga in Russian, and a smaller dog named Shafka.

Has there ever been conjoined dogs?

A female pair of conjoined twins of the Lhasa Apso canine breed was subjected to tomographic and anatomical examinations. The twins had only one head and neck. The two ribcages were joined, extending to the umbilicus, with duplicated structures thereafter.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28940234/

Rodiaga would be the host dog, and schaefka would supply the secondary head and neck with shake his lower body amputated below the four legs keeping her own heart and lungs connected until the last minute before the transplant and a corresponding incision in brodiaga’s neck where schaefer’s upper body would attach the rest was mostly vascular reconstruction other than attaching the dogs’ vertebrae with plastic strings thanks to the team’s wealth of experience Unlike some of his other breakthroughs in the field of transplantology, this head transplant had no real-world applications, but it had very real implications for the dogs. As outrageous as this all sounds, a head transplant wasn’t even that radical for the 1950s; in 1908, French surgeon Dr. Alexis Carroll and his partner, American physiologist Dr. Charles Guthrie, attempted the same experiment. Their dual-headed canine initially showed p Canavero stated last year that they have a tight schedule, but the team in China says they are ready to go anyway.

Most of the medical community believes that a transplant of this kind is still science fiction fodder, but in the not-too-distant future, such a surgery may become a reality.

Q&A – 💬

❓ how did vladimir demikhov make a two-headed dog.

Vladimir Demikhov feeds the two-headed dog he created by grafting the head and two front legs of a puppy onto the back of the neck of a full-grown German shepherd . Starting in 1954, Demikhov and his associates set about performing this surgery 23 times, with varying degrees of success.

❓ What was the two-headed dog experiment and why?

The breakthrough creation of a two-headed dog In 1954, Demikhov successfully grafted the head of a smaller puppy onto a grown-up dog .

• He sewed dogs' circulatory systems together and connected their vertebrae with plastic strings.
• The puppy's head growled and snarled.
• It licked the hand which caressed it.

❓ What was the Soviet 2 headed dog experiment?

You're looking at the horror film-esque result of an early transplant procedure by Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov, and it's really more like a one-and-a-half dog—Demikhov successfully grafted the head and forelegs of a smaller dog, Shavka onto a bigger dog, Brodyaga. Both initially survived the procedure.

❓ Has there ever been a dog with 2 heads?

In 1968, Demikhov transplanted another puppy's head onto the neck of another dog .

• The creatures survived for 38 days.
• Its bodies were then stuffed and in 1988 given to Riga's Museum of History of Medicine.
• For the past two years, it has travelled around Germany for exhibitions.

References:

• “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin” by Steven Lee Myers – Simon & Schuster UK, 2015
• “The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain” by Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, Neil Pemberton – Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018
• “The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People” by James Serpell, Priscilla Barrett – Cambridge University Press, 1995
• “Mason’s World Encyclopedia of Livestock Breeds and Breeding, 2 Volume Pack” by Valerie Porter, Lawrence Alderson, et. al. – CABI, 2016

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Vladimir Demikhov and the Two-Headed Dog Experiment

Last updated on March 7th, 2024 at 02:03 am

Frankenstein may have had a kindred spirit with Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov. 

In 1954, Demikhov successfully grafted the head of a smaller dog onto the neck of a larger one, essentially creating a two-headed dog. 

A few years later, in 1959,  LIFE  magazine visited Demikhov to document what would be the 24th of his creative experiments on canines.

The  LIFE  team reported in detail the gruesome operation. After Demikhov prepared the dogs for surgery, he carved down through the smaller one, Shavka’s, flesh to her vital organs. 

Next, he severed her spine. The magazine article then picks up with this description:

“Although the rest of the body had now been amputated, Shavka’s head and forepaws still retained and used the lungs and heart. Now began the third and most critical phase of the transplantation. The main blood vessels of Shavka’s head had to be connected perfectly with the corresponding vessels of the host dog. Demikhov severed the small dog’s arteries and, with a surgical stapling machine which is the Russian’s special invention, swiftly spliced them into the exposed vessels in Brodyaga’s neck. Shavka’s own heart and lungs were then cut away.”

This nightmarish process resulted in a dog with an extra head that could eat and swallow but little else. 

The head was not connected to the rest of the larger dog’s organs, so all the food that the extra head ingested had to be pumped through a tube and discarded. 

Demikhov had proven that he could turn two healthy dogs into one bizarre-looking dog with a virtual death sentence (the longest living of Demikhov’s dogs lasted one month). But why did he do it?

Hearts and Heads: Vladimir Demikhov’s Strange Experiments

Although Shavka and Brodyaga (the larger dog) only survived for four days, they fared better than many of their predecessors, who quickly died. Overall, Demikhov made at least 20 head grafts throughout his career. 

His work, however, began with hearts.

In 1946, Demikhov began adding an extra heart to dogs to see if it would continue pumping blood. 

Although these second hearts only lasted a few months, he considered the experiments a success. He then wanted to test how much of a dog’s body a single heart could sustain, essentially doing the opposite of the previous heart experiments. 

To that end, he began grafting whole front ends of dogs onto his experimental victims. Shavka and Brodyaga were part of those efforts.

The most successful of Demikhov’s head grafts was undoubtedly a German Shepard named Pirat, who lived for a whole month as host to a smaller dog’s head. 

Demikhov was happy to note that the passenger’s head acted independently of the German Shepherd host, occasionally biting and nibbling Pirat’s ear.

If you’re wondering whether Demikhov had a guilty conscience about what he was doing to his dog subjects, he makes it pretty clear that he lost no sleep over the experiments. 

He claimed that “The big dog doesn’t understand” and that “he feels some kind of inconvenience, but he doesn’t know what it is.” He even joked that Brodyaga was a lucky dog because “You know the saying: two heads are better than one.”

Clearly, Demikhov wasn’t too concerned about the plight of his test subjects. But he wasn’t just carrying out these experiments as a cruel joke. He genuinely wanted to make organ transplants more effective in order to help accident victims who rely on these risky operations. 

In this, Vladimir Demikhov may have indirectly saved the lives of innumerable transplant survivors.

Vladimir Demikhov May Have Been Ahead of His Time

Despite the macabre nature of his experiments, Demikhov had a very good reason for conducting them. His goal was to help advance the science of organ transplants. But, ultimately, he wanted to save lives.

Vladimir Demikhov’s creativity began early. In 1937, when still a student at the University of Moscow, he invented a machine that could act in place of a heart and keep the body sustained with blood for up to five hours.

 It may not sound like much, but in those decades, this was a significant step forward.

During World War II, Demikhov was called to serve as a pathologist in a field hospital. 

Part of his job included evaluating injured soldiers to determine the cause of their injuries. You see, it was not uncommon for soldiers to shoot themselves to escape the front lines and spend the war in a hospital. 

The punishment for being caught faking an injury, however, was death. Demikhov saved many lives by lying about the nature of many soldiers’ self-inflicted injuries.

After the war, Demikhov returned to his experiments. By 1946, he managed to perform the transplantation of a heart and both lungs, which had never been done before. 

But then, during the 1950s, the Ministry of Health looked into Demikhov’s experiments and decided they were unethical. 

That could have been the end of Demikhov’s research; however, his boss at the Moscow Institute of Surgery was the chief army surgeon and thus was able to sidestep the ministry’s directive.

Demikhov continued on, and in 1953 he had his first successful coronary bypass surgery. It gained little attention. His first canine head transplant, which he performed the following year, got people’s attention. 

When the media caught wind of Demikhov’s unusual experiments, he immediately became the target of journalists, activists, and other medical professionals. His work, besides being seen as cruel, has no apparent possible real-world application.

However, others did see value in what Vladimir Demikhov was doing. As unsavory as his work may seem, his experiments were an important step toward figuring out how to carry out human transplants. 

Many of the techniques that he pioneered on dogs during the years of the Cold War have now become standard practice in hospitals around the world.

In 1967, the South African doctor Christian Barnard was the first to carry out a human-to-human heart transplant successfully. 

Years later, he acknowledged a debt of gratitude to Demikhov, saying, “I have always maintained that if there is a father of heart and lung transplantation, then Demikhov certainly deserves this title.”

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Vladimir Demikhov, The Man Who Made A Two-Head Dog

By Joshua N

Updated on November 12, 2023

Vladimir Demikhov started as a trained mechanic and repairman. Eventually, he enrolled at Moscow State University's biology department and went on to earn notoriety as the mad scientist who made the famous two-headed dog.

Demikhov was born in 1916 to peasant parents, and unfortunately, his father died during the Russian Civil War when he was just three. Therefore, he was raised and educated by his mother along with this brother and sister.

As a teenager, he was inspired by Pavlov's experiments with dogs, which gave him an interest in the mammalian circulatory system.

From 1941 to 1945, he took part in the Second World War, where he served as a forensic expert and pathologist. When he returned home from the war, he had won several medals. The global conflict disrupted his research, but not for long.

However, when Demikhov got back to his experiments, his work stirred a lot of controversies. To begin with, just two years into his training at the university, he surprised everyone after creating an artificial heart and sticking it into a dog. The poor animal survived for two hours on its artificial heart.

This was a promising attempt at transplantology, and it was published in the university's student newspaper. He is the man who actually coined the term transplantology, and he is rightly the pioneer of this medical development.

Nevertheless, he was not about to let criticism interrupt his quest for answers, especially not his attempts to create a two-headed dog.

The Two Headed Dog Was Real

Some people might find it hard to believe that a two-headed dog made by a scientist ever existed. If you needed proof, these shocking photos of Vladimir Demikhov's handiwork prove that this mad scientist actually achieved his goal.

Although Demikhov was crazy by many standards, his work on this project made major contributions to the world of medicine.

The reason he chose dogs was that these were his favorite test subjects. The surprising thing is that he managed to achieve this scientific feat in the 50s.

At the time, scientists around the world strongly believed that transplants were not possible because they thought the recipient's immune system would reject the new organ. Additionally, even back then, these kinds of experiments were highly controversial.

Otherwise, Demikhov's goal was to transplant major organs, and the climax of his research was an attempt to graft another dog's head onto another fully intact dog. He tried the procedure 23 times, and the 24th time was a success that got him a lot of public attention. The photos of his two-headed dog were published in LIFE Magazine .

The Two-Headed Dog Could Swallow, See, Hear, And Smell

During the surgery, Demikhov grafted the head of a smaller dog onto the head of a stray German Shepherd. He used the smaller dog's head and neck.

The lower body of the smaller dog was amputated below the front legs, and the lungs and heart were kept operational until it was time for the transplant. At this point, an incision was also made on the host dog to allow the attachment of the smaller dog's head and neck.

The vertebrae of the dogs were attached using plastic rings. Demikhov also conducted vascular reconstruction.

The entire operation took three and a half hours. Upon resuscitation, both heads could swallow, see, hear, and smell.

However, whatever the small dog ate could not get into the stomach of the big dog, as it was not connected to the host dog's stomach. Instead, what the smaller dog swallowed flowed through a pipe to the floor.

The Dog Survived For Four Days

Unfortunately, the two-headed dog survived for four days, and he only succumbed after a vein in the neck was accidentally damaged. However, before its death, it had gained popularity after Associated Press reported the incident. The media establishment explained that Demikhov's two-headed dog was in great health.

Later, shocking photos of the strange creature were shared with the world.

His relative success stirred the medical community. American doctors traveled to the Soviet Union to learn more about these transplant techniques. Among the things they learned was the use of staples to compress veins and arteries during surgical procedures. This trick helped lower surgery time dramatically.

More importantly, by the early 60s, thanks to Demikhov's work, American doctors considered human transplants a possibility.

On his part, Demikhov went on to create another two-headed dog that lived for 29 days. At this time, he had already been doing transplants on dogs for five years, and none of his past subjects had survived for more than six days.

His experiments on dogs were very controversial because head transplants had no real-life applications, although they resulted in many dogs losing their lives.

The Experiment Had Started Much Earlier, But Demikhov Perfected It

Demikhov was not the first scientist to try this experiment. Back in 1908, a French surgeon, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and American physiologist Dr. Charles Guthrie had tried the very same experiment but had to euthanize the two-headed creature a few hours later after its condition worsened.

In the 1920s, Sergei Brukhonenko, a Soviet physician, managed to keep the severed head of a dog alive using a heart-lung machine he named an "auto-injector." The head could respond to stimuli and even feed on bits of cheese.

In the same decade, Dr. Il'ya Ivanov wanted to try a human-ape hybrid. Still, he could only do such an experiment in a lot of secrecy, considering the level of outrage it would generate. He settled for inseminating chimpanzees with human sperm. Eventually, he was sent to prison after he tried to inseminate women with orangutan sperm.

Demikhov Was Credited With The First Successful Human Heart Transplant

Initially, there was a lot of resistance to Demikhov's ideas. Yet, his work managed to convince Christiaan Barnard, a South African cardiac surgeon, that human heart transplants were a possibility.

Christiaan went on to perform the world's first successful heart transplant in 1967, and he attributed his success to Demikhov, whom he called "the father of heart and lung transplantation."

The surgeon visited Demikhov twice to learn more about transplants.

Without a doubt, Demikhov was an inventive pioneer.

However, when he proposed in 1965 that there be a bank where human organs could be stored to be used by surgeons when necessary, his life as a bold researcher changed.

At the time, this proposal sounded outrageous. Soviet scholars were so angered by the idea that they suggested the closure of his lab. That took its toll, and his transplantation experiments went down as he was criticized around the world.

From there, he worked at the Sklifosovsky Institute of Emergency Medicine until he retired in 1986. Nonetheless, he successfully encouraged the use of organ transplants in humans using living organs instead of artificial organs.

The Experiment Started A Race

Demikhov's successful experiments on dogs started a kind of arms race in the medical world. For instance, his success inspired Dr. Robert White to conduct head transplants on monkeys.

The 1970 surgery was a surprising success.

Unfortunately, the monkey was not as happy with its new body as Dr. White and his team was. Filled with indignation, the monkey snapped at him with its teeth angrily before it succumbed to complications a day and a half later.

People were appalled when they learned of the experiment.

Demikhov Died A Pioneer In His Field

Demikhov died aged 82 in a small apartment outside Moscow in 1998. At the time, his experiments were finally acknowledged in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Order for Services for the Fatherland in the year he died.

Without a doubt, a lot of lives have been saved through organ transplants due to his efforts.

For instance, he helped prove the viability of organ transplants when he did a heart transplant on a dog in 1953. The dog survived for 7 years.

Demikhov's dream was that, eventually, his research would result in organ transplants being conducted on humans. That dream is now a reality.

Unfortunately, he did not enjoy this recognition when he was alive. The world decided to put the greatest focus on the fact that he had created a dog with two heads rather than the fact that he had also performed pioneering thoracic transplants, which have made organ failures a lot less deadly today.

Head Transplants Might Be A Reality In The Future

Although Demikhov's head transplant experiment seems crazy to even today, it may be a reality in the future, according to Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon.

Currently, there are attempts to conduct human head transplants. However, Valery Spiridonov, who was scheduled to undergo a head transplant in 2017 due to a muscle-wasting condition, backed out of the procedure after he found love and became a dad.

Nonetheless, experts think that head transplants will have taken place by around 2030.

However, this medical procedure is not without its critics. Many see it as nothing more than a sci-fi fiction gimmick.

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The Two-Headed Dog Experiment: Soviet Scientist who Grafted the Head of the dog onto another Dog

Vladimir Demikhov, a Soviet scientist and organ transplant pioneer, attached a small dog’s upper body to a large dog’s neck in 1959. While he had performed this procedure before (the first time was in 1954), this was the first time the entire procedure had been documented by LIFE magazine. Small dog Shavka was nine years old and large dog Brodyaga, a stray who was picked up in the streets by a dog catcher, was twelve years old.

The dogs were anesthetized prior to the surgery, and the areas to be bisected were shaved, the neck of Brodyaga and the midsection of Shavka. Demikhov and his team cut into Brodyaga’s neck, exposing his jugular vein, aorta, and cervical vertebrae. Then they cut into Shavka’s midsection, layer by layer, attaching small blood vessels to Brodyaga’s. Shavka’s spine was severed behind her shoulders, her lower body removed, and the main blood vessels and trachea were connected to his lungs. Shavka’s heart and lungs were removed as the final step. Her esophagus wasn’t attached to Brodyaga’s stomach, it was outside their bodies.

Both dogs recovered from the surgery and were able to move independently. Brodyaga could lap a few mouthfuls of water from a bowl, but the water ran down Shavka’s esophagus and down Shavka’s neck. Shavka received nutrients and oxygen from Brodyaga’s heart, which was pumping blood into her system. Shavka would bite the large dog’s ear as Brodyaga walked them around the yard. Brodyaga and Shavka died four days after the surgery. Their neck veins were strangled, resulting in their deaths.

The Russian surgeon performed 20 such experiments on dogs. One pair of dogs lived for 29 days, but most lived closer to a week. The majority of the dogs died from tissue rejection (when the recipient’s immune system recognizes transplanted tissue as foreign and destroys it). Today, immunosuppressive drugs are used to reduce the risk of tissue rejection. The experiments Demikhov conducted (mostly on dogs) included heart, lung, and heart-lung transplants. His work paved the way for human organ transplants, and some believe that human head transplantation will occur soon – for example, transplanting the head of a quadriplegic onto a functional donor body. Animal testing continues even today despite alternative methods. Animal rights groups are working hard to stop animal testing so that one day, as soon as possible, there won’t be any more animals suffering for humanity’s benefit.

Written by Benjamin Grayson

Former Bouquet seller now making a go with blogging and graphic designing. I love creating & composing history articles and lists.

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Watch Soviet Scientists Bring a Dog’s Decapitated Head Back to Life

What was supposed to be the stuff of medical miracles ended up being a horror show..

A warning: the video above contains imagery of medical experiments conducted on animals that some might find disturbing.

In 1940, Soviet scientists reanimated a dead dog.

Dr. Sergei Brukhonenko had done pioneering work in blood transfusion several years earlier, a procedure which still remains essential in modern hospitals. But if you can move life-giving blood from one individual to another, why stop there?

While the Americans experimented on primates, the Soviet scientists experimented on dogs. Brukhonenko was able to isolate individual organs and maintain them in working order: a heart would keep pumping blood, lungs breathed on their own.

But those pieces, while important to life, do not a life make. The next step was to reanimate an entire head, brain, face and all, by pumping oxygenated blood through the arteries with the help of a contraption called the “autojektor.” With a blood supply to the brain, the head reacted to stimuli as it would in life, twitching its ears and eyes at pokes and prods. It even licked a substance off its own nose.

Next, another dog, this one completely intact, was given a clinical death, then brought back to life with the autojektor. “After the experiment,” the narrator of Experiments in the Revival of Organisms says over triumphant music, “the dogs live for years, they grow, they put on weight, and have families.”

Some have suggested that the whole thing is a hoax, an elaborate scheme to intimidate American scientists, but no evidence of fakery has been revealed. A contemporary video shows a puppy surgically attached to the torso of another dog , and images of a robot suit piloted by a dog’s head and brain have surfaced online. The only reason these experiments haven’t been recreated since is that the blatant animal abuse and disregard for modern standards of medical ethics would turn stomachs even more that this 1940 video does.

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You've Probably Heard About The Scientist Who Created A Two-Headed Dog

If you have heard the name Vladimir Demikhov, it's probably for the  science fiction-sounding experiments he conducted, in which he transplanted the head of one  dog to another, in effect, creating a two-headed dog. According to Russia Beyond , by the time the Associated Press released the news of the Soviet doctor's experiments to the world in 1959, he had already been experimenting with these transplants for five years ... with mixed results. 

The most famous of these, at least in the West, is Demikhov's twenty-fourth attempt, which Life covered, appropriately enough, as "Russia's Two-Headed Dog." The article followed an operation in which Demikhov's team attached the head and forelegs of one dog to the neck of another. When the operation was completed "[both] heads could see, hear, smell, and swallow."

Unfortunately, the two dogs — Brodyaga and Shavka — only survived for four days, due to a vein in the neck receiving accidental damage. Most of Demikhov's dogs, in fact, barely made it to six days. The longest surviving canines managed to live for twenty-nine days after the operation, thus proving the concept that such transplants were possible. When explaining the failures of the transplants, Demikhov pointed out that it was always the transplant that gave out first: "[Even in our best case] it was the small head, not the host dog, that sickened first. Had we acted in time, we could have saved the host dog."

The real reason why you should've heard of him

The image of Demikhov adding transplanted dog heads does give the impression of an eccentric pursuing a pointless path. However, Vladimir Demikhov was actually blazing a genuine path of scientific inquiry, not science fiction , which he called "transplantology," or the study of organ transplants.

In an article for The Annals of Thoracic Surgery , Dr. Harris Schumacker lauds Demikhov as being the first person to "transplant an auxillary heart into the thorax of a warm-blooded animal, first to replace the heart with a homograft organ, first to carry out a pulmonary transplantation, and first to perform a complete heart and lung replacement." Even in the case of the two-headed dogs, there was an actual point to them, as Demikhov explained in the Life article: His tests revealed that the failure lies with the transplanted part, so a woman who was bothering him for a leg transplant, for instance, could now receive one with minimal risk: "The main problem will be joining the nerves so the woman can control her movements... But I am sure we can lick that problem too." 

While attaching human heads to new bodies still seems out of reach, according to Popular Science , the fact that we can take a beating heart and put it inside another person's body would have struck an early twentieth century scientist as fanciful. Now, it's perfectly possible.

The Russian Scientist Who Believed Two Heads Were Better Than One

If you were the child of Dr. Vladimir Demikhov , a Russian scientist who gained fame in the 1940s and ’50s, a two-headed dog could very well have eaten your homework.

Over the course of 20 years, the controversial Demikhov created at least 20 two-headed animals in his quest to perfect the art of transplantation. Although he sounds like a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, Demikhov’s work was an attempt to understand how damaged organs can be replaced, or how to create artificial substitutes. His studies would eventually set the stage for similar organ transplants some forty years later.

Demikhov’s early work focused on replacing hearts in dogs with artificial blood pumps, but by 1946 he successfully transplanted a second natural heart in a dog. He simply removed part of a lung to clear some space for the extra ticker, which beat independently of the original heart. Some of the two-hearted dogs managed to live up to five months. The ever-curious surgeon carried on his work by experimenting with just how much work a single heart could do. So rather than add a second heart to a dog, he added a second front end of a pup. This would determine if one heart could pump enough blood for both heads.

Demikhov had a breakthrough with a German Shepherd called Pirat. Pirat lasted 30 days with the front end of a puppy attached to him. The puppy’s head was attached by joining major blood vessels. “The big dog doesn’t understand,” the scientist told a visiting reporter. “He feels some kind of inconvenience, but he doesn’t know what it is. Sometimes the puppy will playfully bite the ear of the big dog and Pirat will shake his head but he never has tried to scratch or kick off the extra head.”

An example of Dr. Demikhov’s experiments with two-headed dogs. His curious face is seen in the upper left corner.

Both heads slept and woke independently, which was a breakthrough for Demikhov because it proved that the head could be attached and retain some level of normalcy. Of course, “normalcy” is all relative. The puppy didn’t need to eat or drink, as it gained all its nourishment from Pirat. In fact, when it did drink, the water went down its throat and out onto the Shepherd’s neck.

After a month of astounding scientists and anyone else who happened to see the two-headed on its regular walks, Pirat developed edema, a condition in which lymphatic fluid infiltrates into connective tissue. Demikhov was forced to perform another surgery to amputate the puppy head. Pirat was returned to normal — or at least as normal as a dog could be after gaining and losing a head.

© Marc Hartzman

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 In 1954 Vladimir Demikhov shocked the world by unveiling a surgically created monstrosity: A two-headed dog. He created the creature in a lab on the outskirts of Moscow by grafting the head, shoulders, and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of a mature German shepherd.Demikhov paraded the dog before reporters from around the world. Journalists gasped as both heads simultaneously lapped at bowls of milk, and then cringed as the milk from the puppy’s head dribbled out the unconnected stump of its esophageal tube. 

He was a pioneer :

Vladimir Demikhov, a veteran of the Red Army hospitals in World War 2, believed it was possible to transplant organs like the heart and lungs in human beings.

He was the father of heart bypass surgery.

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Soviet Scientists Managed To Keep A Dog’s Chopped Head Alive

The horrific experiments of sergei brukhonenko.

by Andrei Tapalaga | May 4, 2023 | Science

Overview of Soviet Scientists’ Experiments on Dogs

In the late 1920s, Soviet scientists made significant advances in research related to artificial organs and transplants. Led by scientist Sergei Brukhonenko, their pioneering work focused largely on reanimating dead or near-dead organisms and performing major organ transplants. They made incredible progress in fields such as blood transfusion, organ transplantation, and artificial respiration. Most notably, they developed a technique for keeping a severed dog’s head alive for days after it was separated from its body – an incredible feat that has since been used as a point of reference for modern researchers today.

Their innovations soon caught the attention of the international scientific community. American doctor Robert E. Gross praised the Soviet scientists’ efforts, noting that “no other scientist had ever accomplished such successes before.” The experiments conducted by Sergei Brukhonenko and his team revolutionized medical research in this field and opened up new possibilities for further research into artificial organs and transplants.

The techniques developed by the Soviet scientists allowed them to replicate human-like heart activity in animals with artificial hearts. This breakthrough paved the way for future advancements in heart surgery and organ transplantation technology. In addition to this remarkable accomplishment, they also managed to keep a severed dog’s head alive for days after it was cut off from its body – an experiment that has been widely studied since then as a key example of experimental medical science.

Sergei Brukhonenko’s extraordinary achievements are still celebrated today as some of the most important milestones in organ transplantation and tissue research history. His success set a new standard for medical science experiments at the time – one which is still referenced today by modern researchers who are looking to push boundaries in this field even further.

Sergei Brukhonenko and His Research

Throughout his career, Sergei Brukhonenko was a pioneer in the field of medical research and surgery. His revolutionary experiments with artificial hearts and primitive life support systems pushed the boundaries of what was possible in science at the time, allowing for incredible advances in organ transplantation and tissue research which have since been built upon by subsequent generations of scientists. Despite some ethical controversy surrounding his methods, Brukhonenko’s legacy lives on as one of the most important figures in modern medicine.

The Dog’s Head Experiment

In 1928, Soviet scientist Sergei Brukhonenko conducted a groundbreaking experiment that changed the way we think about organ transplantation and tissue research. He was the first to successfully keep a dog’s head alive after it had been severed from its body, by attaching it to a primitive artificial circulation apparatus. This apparatus was powered by an electric pump and tubes filled with saline solution, and allowed the head to remain alive for up to one hour, showing signs of life such as breathing, blinking, and reacting to external stimuli.

This remarkable feat of science demonstrated the potential of organ transplantation and tissue research in ways that had never been seen before. It showed how an animal could be kept alive even without its body – something which was thought impossible at the time – and opened up new possibilities for medical research into this area. The success of this experiment has since become a point of reference for modern researchers looking into organ transplantation or tissue preservation techniques.

The apparatus constructed by Sergei Brukhonenko for his experiment is known as Autojector IV-A (also known as ‘the Dog’s Head Apparatus’) and is now on display in Moscow’s Museum of Science. It consists of several components: an airtight glass box containing the severed dog’s head; two electric pumps connected by hoses filled with saline solution; two glass containers also connected by hoses; a rubber hose connecting the glass box to one container; and a set of electrodes attached to the head itself in order to monitor any brain activity present.

The Autojector IV-A proved that severed organs can be kept alive outside their bodies if they are provided with sufficient oxygenated blood supply while being monitored carefully. This discovery revolutionized medical research into organ transplantation, paving the way for more sophisticated techniques like heart transplants, which are now commonplace in modern medicine today.

Although there have been ethical debates over Brukhonenko’s experiments ever since they were first conducted, it cannot be denied that his innovative work has helped shape modern medical science for many years afterwards. His achievements are still celebrated today as one of the most important figures in medicine history who pushed boundaries beyond what people thought possible at the time – including keeping a dog’s chopped head alive!

Here is also a video from that era showing a diagram of the experiment as well as the dog’s head moving.

Reactions to the Head Transplant

When Sergei Brukhonenko’s experiment to keep a severed dog’s head alive was made public, it sparked a great deal of controversy. Many people were appalled by the inhumane nature of the experiment and voiced their ethical concerns. Animal rights activists argued that the experiment crossed a moral line, and some even called for legal action to be taken against Brukhonenko. Others questioned whether the experiment had any real scientific value and whether it was more of a publicity stunt than anything else.

The Soviet government also distanced itself from the experiment. Although they praised Brukhonenko’s accomplishments, they were unwilling to condone such an ethically questionable activity. As a result, Brukhonenko was never allowed to repeat his experiments or conduct similar research in the future .

The Two-Headed Dog Experiment

The potential implications of successful head transplants were also cause for concern among many people. Some feared that such an accomplishment could lead to horrific consequences, such as creating an immortal being or altering human biology in unpredictable ways. Such worries are still present today despite advancements in medical science and biotechnology that have enabled successful organ transplants on humans without serious complications.

To this day, there are still those who view Sergei Brukhonenko’s experiment as unnecessary or even dangerous. Despite this criticism, however, his achievements remain celebrated as one of the most important figures in modern medicine who pushed boundaries beyond what people thought possible at the time. His pioneering research into organ transplantation and tissue preservation will always be remembered as an incredible milestone in medical science history that has opened up many possibilities for future generations of scientists and doctors alike.

Legacy of Sergei Brukhonenko and His Experiments

The impact of Sergei Brukhonenko and his experiments is unquestionable. His pioneering work in the 20th century was a major milestone in the field of organ transplantation and tissue research, setting a new standard for what could be achieved. This achievement enabled scientists to develop more sophisticated treatments such as heart transplants, leading to enhanced medical care for those who are ill or have suffered trauma or injury.

Although some criticize the ethical implications of Brukhonenko’s experiment , it remains celebrated by many scientists today as a breakthrough moment in medical science history that opened up new realms of possibilities previously thought impossible. Subsequent advances in technology have made further experiments more humane while still advancing medical science.

The legacy of Sergei Brukhonenko lives on to this day through his incredible contribution to medicine, which has resulted in improved treatments for various conditions and diseases across the world. Thanks to his efforts, we now have access to safer organ transplants and life support systems which save countless lives every day.

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Vintage Everyday

Bring back some good or bad memories, may 1, 2022, the two-headed dog experiment: shavka and brodyaga, two soviet dogs became famous in history by becoming one.

8 comments:

what a disgusting piece of shit. the human race really deserves to rot in hell or whatever is out there for us. we should reject medication and operations. god I hope this guy and his team died a painful death.

Ffs ytfff, use ur exeprtise to solve actual problems instead of mutating animals u fuck

Please, no more post like this

Leave it to communists to commit such abominations and call it a good thing. Vladimir Demikhov is rotting in hell right this minute.

вы ошибаетесь, его работы помогут человечеству...

C'est horrible !!!!! Paix aux âmes de ces êtres innocents ! J'ai honte d'être de la même espèce que ces personnes sans coeur , sans remords , sans empathie . Laissez ces animaux tranquilles : ils ont bien plus de choses à nous apprendre vivants que morts !

в чем же ужас? а если бы у вас отказывало сердце, то вам тоже не стоило бы пересадить сердце от донора? это наука, призванная помочь людям

i be like shietttt dawgg......

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