Although Vladimir Demikhov’s experiments may seem rather strange, he was actually a pioneer in organ surgery and inspired the transplant of vital organs. Although he carried out many experiments throughout his career, his incredible practices for these two dogs contributed to his name being heard even more.
In addition to these, let’s take a closer look at the details of this experiment, the ethicalness of which is the subject of much debate.
Vladimir Demikhov was one of the prominent figures in organ transplantation in the 30s and 50s.
During the period, Stalin established some secret medical facilities to conduct post-war organ transplants and life-expanding experiments and began to support Demikhov.
Meanwhile, this scientist continued to perform heart and lung transplants between animals in his laboratory. Then Demikhov’s colleague Prof. Dr. When the first dog head transplant by AG Konevskiy was successful, Demikhov started working in this direction.
The Soviet scientist chose two different subjects for this operation.
One was a large German Shepherd dog, which Demikhov called Brodyaga (Russian for “vagrant”), and the other was a smaller breed called Shavka. In this experiment, Brodyaga would be the host dog, and Shavka would supply the secondary head and neck. Again, the puppy’s head, shoulders, and front legs would be grafted onto Brodyaga.
Dr. Demikhov began this three-and-a-half hour study by attaching an artificial blood pump to a dog. He would then attach a second heart to a dog’s chest and remove a portion of the lung for the second heart. Thus, this second heart continued to beat independently of the original heart, maintaining its rhythm for a while.
Also, since the transplanted dog was a puppy, the German Shepherd’s heart was able to pump enough blood in the first place.
Both heads could see, hear, smell and swallow after this experiment, but there was no connection between the small dog and the German shepherd’s stomach. For this reason, everything the little dog consumed flowed down a tube to the ground.
In the end, this two-headed dog lived only four days. If a vein in his neck hadn’t been accidentally damaged, he might have outlived Demikhov’s longest-lived two-headed dog, which survived 29 days.
Even if we leave the deaths of dogs aside, it is possible to say that the moral implications of Demikhov’s experiment are highly misleading.
In addition, although this head transplant seems to contribute to some advances in the field of transplantology, it has not yet been proven that it is possible to keep these two dogs alive in real life.
Based on the experiments of Vladimir Demikhov, the French surgeon Dr. Alexis Carrel and her partner, American Physiologist Dr. Charles Guthrie did the same for the two dogs. The double-headed dogs of these two, although promising at first, died within a few hours and were euthanized.
Most of the medical community now believes that such transplants are just science fiction, but there is always the possibility that they will become reality with the work of scientists in the future.
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