I’ve Been Working in The Kremlin with a Two-Headed Dog
In recent weeks, there has been some news coverage of Dr Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, who has put forward the possibility of human head transplants within the next few years.
Despite the obvious moral and ethical implications inherent in such a procedure, and the technical skills to achieve such a feat, head transplants are nothing new. In fact, in the 1950’s, as well as the nuclear arms race between the USSR and the USA, there was also a transplanted head race between these ideologically opposed nations.
In 1954, a Soviet scientist, Dr Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov, began a series of truly bizarre experiments in which he grafted the head and limbs of a dog onto another dog. In total, this transplantation was attempted 24 times with different dogs, with different levels of success.
Demikhov was a pioneering organ transplant scientist, whose contributions to organ transplantation included animal heart and lung transplants, leading Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who performed the world’s first successful human-to-human heart transplant, to say: “I have always maintained that if there is a father of heart and lung transplantation then Demikhov certainly deserves this title”.
In 1959, Life Magazine was allowed to send a photographer and journalist to document the process, Demikhov’s 24th and final procedure, which gave rise to a series of photographs and an article called “Russia’s Two-Headed Dog” that makes for some bizarre and uncomfortable reading.
The article, written by Edmund Stevens and photographed by Howard Sochurek, covers the fates of two dogs — Shavka and Brodyaga. Shavka was a 9 year old mongrel, whereas the history of Brodyaga (meaning ‘Tramp’ in Russian) was a stray that had been picked up by a dogcatcher.
When the two Life Magazine journalists entered the operating room, Shavka was awake, but shaved around the middle, whereas Brodyaga was already under anaesthetic, with a shaved area around its neck and shoulders. Demikhov joked that “You know the saying: two heads are better than one”.
In an operation that lasted three and a half hours, Demikhov carefully amputated most of Shavka, leaving only the top half of the dog, with heart, lungs, forelegs and head intact. Once this had been done, incisions were made into Brodyaga and the corresponding blood vessels from each dog were carefully and painstakingly connected with a Russian made surgical stapling machine. Once all the connections had been made and sealed, Shavka’s heart and lungs were finally excised and the two dogs were stitched together. Brodyaga was now breathing and supplying blood for heads.
Demikhov touched the eyelids of the two dogs and observed that both flickered. The operation had been a success, both dogs had survived. “Well, so far so good”, he said, “If there are no clots, all will be well. Clots are our worst enemy”.
The Brodyaga/Shavka hybrid awoke some time later. It was a tense time — none of the previous hybrids had lived that long — the longest lived was a month, due to tissue rejection, but that had not discouraged Demikhov from continuing his experiments. Brodyaga/Shavka appeared healthy enough, with both heads feeding and drinking and aware of their surroundings. It is very doubtful though that either dog knew what had actually happened or understood the incredibly bizarre groundbreaking nature of what had happened to them.
Brodyaga/Shavka died four days later; the victim of a twisted connecting vein in the neck whilst the dogs slept. Demikhov did not consider this a failure of the surgery, but rather an unfortunate accident. He was upbeat about the possibilities of transplantation and talked animatedly about human transplants with whole limbs. However, a review committee of the Soviet Ministry of Health eventually deemed Demikhov’s work to be unethical, and he was instructed to cease his research projects.
Despite the ethical implications, Dr Robert White, a neurosurgeon and a professor of neurological surgery of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio began to experiment on monkeys, inspired by the work of Demikhov.
White went one better than Demikhov; in 1970, instead of attaching another head to the body of a monkey that had its own head, he managed to successfully transplant the head of a monkey onto the headless body of another monkey.
In order to achieve this head transplant, the spinal cord of both monkeys had to be severed, something that wasn’t done with Demikhov’s dogs, where only one of the dogs spinal cords was severed. This mean that, should the operation be successful, the resultant monkey would be quadriplegic. Despite recent research that suggests that it is possible to reconnect spinal cords without turning the subject into a quadriplegic, this was beyond the medical knowledge of the time.
The operation took eighteen hours, involved a team of thirty doctors, nurses and technicians and was carefully choreographed; it involved cauterising the blood vessels carefully while the head was being severed to prevent the head and body going into shock. The nerves were left entirely intact, which meant that connecting the brain to a blood supply kept it alive.
Whilst the monkey was indeed a quadriplegic after the operation, it was reported to be able to smell, taste, hear, and see. The animal survived nine days after the operation, even at times attempting to bite some of the staff, before succumbing to immunorejection.
White repeated the experiment in 2001 with some success and it is in part down to his follow on work on monkeys and human cadavers that Canavero can now talk about the possibilities of human head transplants; Demikhov, despite being censured by the Soviet Ministry of Health, continued his work on transplants. He was awarded the Pioneer Award by the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, he also received the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 3rd class and a USSR State Prize. He died in 1998 in obscurity and poverty, but it was due to his pioneering work on organ transplants and cardiothoracic surgery that gained him international recognition, if not fame and riches. Most of his ideas are now a part of routine clinical and surgical practice, but he is most remembered for his two-headed dogs.
