USSR collie project. Collie project: how animals were brought to life in the USSR

In 1928, Sergei Bryukhonenko revived a dog's head separated from the body. Without these experiences, modern resuscitation and transplantation would be impossible.

Recently, while browsing the feed of posts on Google+, I came across an entry with a photograph of a shabby and partially soaked archival document numbered P13/144. In a photograph yellowed by time (judging by the stamp, the document was declassified in the early nineties), people in white coats stand near a table on which a device is mounted that maintains life in the head of a collie dog. dog body is nearby, and, apparently, life in it is also forcibly preserved.

The author of the post asked the Google+ audience whether this document was a fake, the result of someone's crazy imagination and the same skills in handling graphics processing tools. Most of the debaters believed that this pure water fake. Looking at the half-erased seal of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the stamp "Top Secret" on the document, which was used only in party office work, I thought with a sinful deed about the reality of the events captured in the photo, especially since memory helpfully tossed up facts about the "war of heads" that was waged between the USSR and the USA in sixties and seventies.

Meanwhile, another photographic document appeared in the discussion thread: a page from the book, which depicted the “V.R. Lebedev Life Saving Machine (ASZhL)” with the very dog ​​head of the Collie breed connected to it.


Life saving machine named after the mysterious Lebedev

The surname of the creator of the "machine" made me delve into history, looking for all the scientists who tried one way or another to breathe life into a dog's head separated from the body. True, I began with science fiction, remembering Belyaev's famous "Professor Dowell's Head".

Ioakim Petrov. "The problem of revitalization of organisms". We train on cats

In 1939, in the fifth issue of the journal "Children's Literature", Alexander Belyaev published an article "About my works". This article was a response to criticism of his novel "Professor Dowell's Head". The reviewer of the novel, a certain comrade Rykalev, believed that there was nothing fantastic in Professor Dowell's Head, since the successful results of experiments on reviving dog heads conducted by the Soviet scientist Bryukhonenko are widely known.

In his article, Belyaev explained that the novel is about the revival human head was written by him more than fifteen years ago, that is, in 1924, and that at that time none of the Soviet scientists even planned such experiments.


Alexander Belyaev

Moreover, such experiments were not done by the doctors on whose work Bryukhonenko relied. Belyaev calls their names: Professor I. Petrov, Chechulin and Mikhailovsky - and even refers to I. Petrov's article "Problems of Revival", published in Izvestia in 1937. Who is this professor I. Petrov, and what experiments did he conduct? I found the answer in the second issue of the journal "Science and Life" for 1939, where Professor I. R. Petrov from the Military Medical Academy of the Red Army named after S. M. Kirov published an article "The problem of reviving organisms" (which, as I understand it, was more detailed version of his work, published earlier in Izvestia).


Article by Joakim Ivanov in more focused on resuscitation

On the website of the Military Medical Academy named after S. M. Kirov, I found out that Joakim Romanovich Petrov in 1939 headed the Department of Pathological Physiology and within twenty four years was its undisputed leader. Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the SSR Major General Petrov made a great contribution to the development of domestic resuscitation. He was most famous for the development of a blood-substituting solution, still referred to as "Petrov's liquid", which saved during the years of the Great Patriotic War many lives.

In his article "The Problem of Reviving Organisms," Ioakim Romanovich talks about the relevance of reviving humans and animals after the cessation of heartbeat and respiration, and also gives many examples of experiments that were carried out on cats. The descriptions of the experiments, it should be noted, are very frank by today's Greenpeace times ("... even in animals that were reanimated twice and three times after deathly strangulation...").

However, the article did not contain a word about experiments to revive a single animal's head. But there was a reference to the work of the French physiologist Brown-Séquard, who in 1848 revived organs and tissues by washing them blood vessels blood. By the way, Belyaev also referred to Brown-Sekara in his article, mentioning that the Frenchman conducted the first imperfect experiments on reviving a dog's head back in the nineteenth century.

Charles Brown-Séquard. French professor Preobrazhensky

Surprisingly, the outstanding French physiologist, member of the British Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences of France Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard did not plan to become a doctor in his youth. Literature was his element. However, the writer Charles Nodier, to whom he showed his writings, dissuaded Brown-Séquard from engaging in literature. Not because talent young man was not, but because the writer's work did not bring sufficient earnings.

In his youth, Charles Brown-Séquard was a romantic by nature. Apparently, therefore, he firmly believed in the effectiveness of the "elixir of youth" invented by him.

Perhaps the world has lost a writer, but gained a passionate physiologist. Brown-Sequard proved himself to be very prolific (more than five hundred scientific papers) and a courageous scientist who was not afraid of criticism from his colleagues. In 1858, he shocked the scientific community by restoring vital functions to a dog's head that had been severed from its body. Brown-Séquard did this by passing arterial blood through the blood vessels of the head (the function of perfusion).

But Brown-Sequard was best known for his experiments on rejuvenating the body by introducing serum from the gonads of animals (dogs and rabbits). Brown-Séquard conducted these experiments on himself. At the same time, he was so convinced of their effectiveness that at the age of seventy-two he made a special report at a meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences, assuring his colleagues that his health after using the "elixir of youth" had improved significantly. The report caused a great sensation. Newspapermen introduced the term "rejuvenation". Of course, it is now obvious that self-hypnosis played the greatest role in improving the well-being of an aging scientist, but at that time his experiments were considered a breakthrough in the field of prolongation. active life person. Most likely, it was the story of the "elixir of youth" by Brown-Sequard that inspired Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov to write the story "Heart of a Dog".

Brown-Sequard was one of the first head animators. But in the photo under discussion, we see a team of Soviet scientists. As we found out, the Soviet academician Ioakim Petrov did not deal with the resurrection of heads separated from the body. But in Belyaev's article there is another surname - Bryukhonenko.

Autojet by Sergey Bryukhonenko

The history of the creation of the first heart-lung machine (AIC) is connected with the name of Sergey Sergeevich Bryukhonenko. Forced to engage in practical surgery immediately after graduating from the medical faculty of Moscow State University (at that time the First World War), Sergei Bryukhonenko was inspired by the idea of ​​maintaining the life support of the body and its individual organs by organizing artificial blood circulation in them.

This idea was embodied in the autojet device, which Bryukhonenko and his colleagues developed and patented in 1925.


Sergey Bryukhonenko's autojet patent page

It was to demonstrate the capabilities of the autojector that Bryukhonenko conducted his famous experiment with the revival of a dog's head. Using rubber tubes, an autojector imitating a heart was connected to the amputated animal's head in the systemic circulation and to the amputated lungs in the pulmonary circulation. In 1928, the revived dog's head was demonstrated by Bryukhonenko to the scientific community. The head reacted to external stimuli and even ate the cheese offered to it!


The unique experience of Sergei Bryukhonenko "lit up" even in the Marvel comics of that time

The results of Bryukhonenko's sensational experiment were immediately presented by ideologues as an unconditional victory for Soviet science. It was they who were used by Comrade Rykalev, criticizing the novel by Alexander Belyaev. But, of course, the main merit of the invention of Sergei Bryukhonenko is that for the first time in practice the principle of artificially maintaining the life of the body and individual organs was implemented, without which modern resuscitation and transplantology are inconceivable.


Separately living dog's head, made by Sergey Bryukhonenko

Sergei Sergeevich Bryukhonenko actively worked on improving the device he created, working in the forties in the laboratory of experimental pathology at the Sklifosovsky Moscow Institute for Emergency Medicine, and later at the Research Institute of Experimental Surgical Equipment and Instruments. In 1965, he was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize for the development of an artificial blood circulation system.

But not all "animal heads" fate was so favorable. An example of this is the fate of the great experimenter Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov, whom transplantologists around the world deservedly consider their teacher.

Vladimir Demikhov. twenty two-headed dogs

The talent of an experimenter manifested itself in Vladimir Demikhov during his student days. In 1937, as a student of the physiological department of the biological faculty of Moscow State University, Demikhov independently manufactured an apparatus that can now be called an artificial heart. A physiology student tested his development on a dog that lived with Demikhov's artificial heart for about two hours.

Then there was the war and work as a pathologist. And the dream is to help dying people by transplanting them with new vital organs. In the period from 1946 to 1950, Vladimir Demikhov, working at the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Surgery, performed a number of unique operations, performing the world's first heart, lung and liver transplantation on animals. In 1952, he developed the coronary artery bypass grafting technique that is now saving thousands of lives.


More than twenty two-headed dogs were created in the laboratory of Vladimir Demikhov

Demonstrating the refinement and effectiveness of the techniques he developed, Demikhov in 1954 performed a unique operation to transplant a dog's head onto the body of another dog. Later, in his laboratory, Demikhov will create more than twenty two-headed dogs, practicing on them the method of connecting blood vessels and nervous tissue.

However, the obvious achievements of Demikhov were perceived far from being unambiguous. Working at the first Moscow Medical Institute named after I.M. Sechenov, Vladimir Petrovich, due to disagreements with the directorate of the institute, was never able to defend his dissertation on the topic "Transplantation of vital organs in the experiment." Meanwhile, his book of the same name became a bestseller in many countries around the world and for a long time was the only textbook on practical transplantology.

In 1965, Demikhov's report on organ transplantation (including heads) in dogs, made by him at a meeting of the section of transplantologists, was subjected to severe criticism and was called nonsense and pure charlatanism. Until the end of his life, Vladimir Petrovich was persecuted by his Soviet "colleagues" in the shop. And this despite the fact that Christian Bernard, the first surgeon who performed a human heart transplant, visited Demikhov's laboratory twice before his operation and considers him his teacher.

It is with the name of Vladimir Demikhov that the same "race of heads" is connected, which began in the sixties between the USSR and the USA in parallel with the "space race".


Dr. Robert White

In 1966, the US government began funding the work of Cleveland General Hospital surgeon Robert White. In March 1970, White successfully performed an operation to transplant the head of one monkey onto the body of another.

By the way, as in the case of Demikhov, White's work in the United States was severely criticized. And if Soviet ideologists accused Vladimir Petrovich of trampling on communist morality, then White was "hung" for violating the monopoly of God's providence. Until the end of his life, White raised funds for a human head transplant operation. He even had a volunteer - a paralyzed Craig Vetovitz.

Collie Project. The final

Well, what about the archival document from which my investigation began, and the "life saving machine named after V. R. Lebedev"?




Of course, it all turned out to be fake. But falsification in good sense this word. These documents are the result of work carried out within the framework of the creative computer graphics project "Collie". Only a frankly paranoid person can consider the use of a "life-saving machine" to create a Soviet cyborg collie as true.

Fake? Definitely. Only here it is based on fate real people. Experimenters who were not afraid to turn Belyaev's fantasy story into reality.

Recently, while browsing the feed of posts on Google+, I came across an entry with a photograph of a shabby and partially soaked archival document numbered P13/144. In a photograph yellowed by time (judging by the stamp, the document was declassified in the early nineties), people in white coats stand near a table on which a device is mounted that maintains life in the head of a collie dog. The dog's body is nearby, and, apparently, life in it is also forcibly preserved. The author of the post asked the Googleplus audience whether this document is a fake, the result of someone's crazy imagination and the same skills in handling graphics processing tools. Most of the debaters believed that this was pure fake. Looking at the half-erased seal of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the “Top Secret” stamp on the document, which was used only in party office work, I thought with a sinful deed about the reality of the events captured in the photo, especially since the memory helpfully tossed up facts about the “war of heads” that was waged between the USSR and the USA in the sixties and seventies. Meanwhile, another photo document appeared in the discussion thread: a page from the book, which depicted the “V.R. Lebedev (ASZhL) ”with the same dog head of the collie breed connected to it. The surname of the creator of the“ machine ”made me delve into history, looking for all the scientists who tried in one way or another to breathe life into a dog head separated from the body. True, I started with science fiction, remembering Belyaev's famous "Professor Dowell's Head".

Ioakim Petrov. "The problem of revitalization of organisms". We train on cats
In 1939, in the fifth issue of the journal "Children's Literature", Alexander Belyaev published an article "About my works". This article was a response to criticism of his novel The Head of Professor Dowell. The reviewer of the novel, a certain comrade Rykalev, believed that there was nothing fantastic in Professor Dowell's Head, since the successful results of experiments on reviving dog heads conducted by the Soviet scientist Bryukhonenko are widely known.

In his article, Belyaev explained that he wrote a novel about the revival of the human head more than fifteen years ago, that is, in 1924, and that at that time none of the Soviet scientists even planned such experiments.

Moreover, such experiments were not done by the doctors on whose work Bryukhonenko relied. Belyaev names their names: Professor I. Petrov, Chechulin and Mikhailovsky - and even refers to I. Petrov's article "Problems of Revival", published in Izvestia in 1937. Who is this professor I. Petrov, and what experiments did he conduct? I found the answer in the second issue of the journal "Science and Life" for 1939, where Professor I. R. Petrov from the Military Medical Academy of the Red Army named after S. M. Kirov published an article "The problem of reviving organisms" (which, as I understand it, was a more detailed version of his work, published earlier in Izvestia).

On the website of the Military Medical Academy named after S. M. Kirov, I found out that Joakim Romanovich Petrov in 1939 headed the Department of Pathological Physiology and for twenty-four years was its permanent leader. Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the SSR Major General Petrov made a great contribution to the development of domestic resuscitation. He was most famous for the development of a blood-substituting solution, still referred to as "Petrov's liquid", which saved many lives during the Great Patriotic War.

In his article “The Problem of Organism Revival,” Ioakim Romanovich talks about the relevance of reviving humans and animals after the cessation of heartbeat and respiration, and also gives many examples of experiments that were carried out on cats. The descriptions of the experiments, it should be noted, are very frank in modern Greenpeace times ("... even in animals that were reanimated twice and three times after deathly strangulation...").
However, the article did not contain a word about experiments to revive a single animal's head. But there was a reference to the work of the French physiologist Brown-Séquard, who in 1848 revived organs and tissues by washing their blood vessels with blood. By the way, Belyaev also referred to Brown-Sekara in his article, mentioning that the Frenchman conducted the first imperfect experiments on reviving a dog's head back in the nineteenth century.

Charles Brown-Séquard. French professor Preobrazhensky
Surprisingly, the outstanding French physiologist, member of the British Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences of France Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard did not plan to become a doctor in his youth. Literature was his element. However, the writer Charles Nodier, to whom he showed his writings, dissuaded Brown-Séquard from engaging in literature. Not because the young man had no talent, but because writing did not bring sufficient income. Perhaps the world lost a writer, but gained a passionate physiologist. Brown-Sequard proved himself to be very prolific (more than five hundred scientific papers) and a courageous scientist who was not afraid of criticism from his colleagues. In 1858, he shocked the scientific community by restoring vital functions to a dog's head that had been severed from its body. Brown-Séquard did this by passing arterial blood through the blood vessels of the head (the function of perfusion).

But Brown-Sequard was best known for his experiments on rejuvenating the body by introducing serum from the gonads of animals (dogs and rabbits). Brown-Séquard conducted these experiments on himself. At the same time, he was so confident in their effectiveness that at the age of seventy-two he made a special report at a meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences, assuring his colleagues that his health after using the “elixir of youth” had improved significantly. The report caused a great sensation. Newspapermen introduced the term "rejuvenation". Of course, it is now obvious that self-hypnosis played the greatest role in improving the well-being of an aging scientist, but at that time his experiments were considered a breakthrough in the field of prolonging a person's active life. Most likely, it was the story of the “elixir of youth” by Brown-Sequard that inspired Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov to write the story “Heart of a Dog”.

Brown-Sequard was one of the first head animators. But in the photo under discussion, we see a team of Soviet scientists. As we found out, the Soviet academician Ioakim Petrov did not deal with the resurrection of heads separated from the body. But in Belyaev's article there is another surname - Bryukhonenko.

Autojet by Sergey Bryukhonenko

The history of the creation of the first heart-lung machine (AIC) is connected with the name of Sergey Sergeevich Bryukhonenko. Forced to engage in practical surgery immediately after graduating from the medical faculty of Moscow State University (at that time the First World War was in full swing), Sergey Bryukhonenko set about trying to maintain the life support of the body and its individual organs by organizing artificial circulation in them.

This idea was embodied in the autojector device, which Bryukhonenko and his colleagues developed and patented in 1925. It was to demonstrate the capabilities of the autojector that Bryukhonenko conducted his famous experiment with reviving a dog's head. Using rubber tubes, an autojector imitating a heart was connected to the amputated animal's head in the systemic circulation and to the amputated lungs in the pulmonary circulation. In 1928, the revived dog's head was demonstrated by Bryukhonenko to the scientific community. The head reacted to external stimuli and even ate the cheese offered to it!

The results of Bryukhonenko's sensational experiment were immediately presented by ideologues as an unconditional victory for Soviet science. It was they who were used by Comrade Rykalev, criticizing the novel by Alexander Belyaev. But, of course, the main merit of the invention of Sergei Bryukhonenko is that for the first time in practice the principle of artificially maintaining the life of the body and individual organs was implemented, without which modern resuscitation and transplantology are inconceivable.

Sergei Sergeevich Bryukhonenko actively worked on improving the device he created, working in the forties in the laboratory of experimental pathology at the Sklifosovsky Moscow Institute for Emergency Medicine, and later at the Research Institute of Experimental Surgical Equipment and Instruments. In 1965, he was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize for the development of an artificial blood circulation system.

But fate was not so favorable to all the "revivers of heads". An example of this is the fate of the great experimenter Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov, whom transplantologists around the world deservedly consider their teacher.
Vladimir Demikhov. twenty two-headed dogs
The talent of an experimenter manifested itself in Vladimir Demikhov during his student days. In 1937, as a student of the physiological department of the biological faculty of Moscow State University, Demikhov independently made an apparatus that can now be called an artificial heart. A physiology student tested his development on a dog that lived with Demikhov's artificial heart for about two hours.

Then there was the war and work as a pathologist. And the dream is to help dying people by transplanting them with new vital organs. In the period from 1946 to 1950, Vladimir Demikhov, working at the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Surgery, performed a number of unique operations, performing the world's first heart, lung and liver transplantation on animals. In 1952, he developed the coronary artery bypass grafting technique that is now saving thousands of lives.

Demonstrating the refinement and effectiveness of the techniques he developed, Demikhov in 1954 performed a unique operation to transplant a dog's head onto the body of another dog. Later, in his laboratory, Demikhov will create more than twenty two-headed dogs, practicing on them the method of connecting blood vessels and nervous tissue.

However, the obvious achievements of Demikhov were perceived far from being unambiguous. Working at the first Moscow Medical Institute named after I.M. Sechenov, Vladimir Petrovich, due to disagreements with the directorate of the institute, was never able to defend his dissertation on the topic "Transplantation of vital organs in the experiment." Meanwhile, his book of the same name became a bestseller in many countries of the world and for a long time was the only textbook on practical transplantology.

In 1965, Demikhov's report on organ transplantation (including heads) in dogs, made by him at a meeting of the section of transplantologists, was subjected to severe criticism and was called nonsense and pure charlatanism. Until the end of his life, Vladimir Petrovich was persecuted by Soviet "colleagues" in the shop. And this despite the fact that Christian Bernard, the first surgeon who performed a human heart transplant, visited Demikhov's laboratory twice before his operation and considers him his teacher.

It is with the name of Vladimir Demikhov that the very “race of heads” that began in the sixties between the USSR and the USA in parallel with the “space race” is associated. In 1966, the US government began funding the work of Cleveland Central Hospital surgeon Robert White. In March 1970, White successfully performed an operation to transplant the head of one monkey onto the body of another.

By the way, as in the case of Demikhov, White's work in the United States was severely criticized. And if Vladimir Petrovich was accused by Soviet ideologists of trampling on communist morality, then White was "hung" for violating the monopoly of God's providence. Until the end of his life, White raised funds for a human head transplant operation. He even had a volunteer - a paralyzed Craig Vetovitz.

Collie Project. The final
Well, what about the archival document from which my investigation began, and the “life saving machine named after V. R. Lebedev”?


Of course, it all turned out to be fake. But falsification in the best sense of the word. These documents are the result of work carried out within the framework of the creative project of computer graphics "Collie". Only a frankly paranoid person can consider the use of a “life-saving machine” to create a Soviet cyborg collie as true.

Fake? Definitely. Only here it is based on the fate of real people. Experimenters who were not afraid to turn Belyaev's fantasy story into reality.

Do not hit hard for the first time I write, especially since I'm 12 years old))

The end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s was a time of significant progress in the field of scientific experiments throughout the world and in the USSR. In those years, bold experiments of Soviet scientists on animals began. A number of pioneering studies were carried out at Moscow University and the Academy of Sciences. And already in 1950, the Russian scientist Vladimir Demikhov surprised the whole world when he transplanted a dog's head onto another dog. The two-headed dog lived for a whole month.

In the first period of the Cold War, all the forces of Soviet science were involved in the creation of perfect weapons. In 1958, a secret Soviet project was launched to create a cyborg robot. The scientific consultant was the Nobel Prize winner V. Manuilov. In the design of the robot, with the exception of designers, physicians and engineers participated. Mice, rats and dogs have been proposed for human safety experiments. The option of experiments on monkeys was considered, but the choice fell on dogs, as they are better trained and calmer than monkeys. Subsequently, this project was named "COLLY" and lasted almost 10 years. But by the decree of the Central Committee of January 4, 1969, the activity of the Collie project was terminated, the information became secret ... In 1991, all data on the COLLIE project were declassified ... In 1991, all information about the Kollie project became secret.

In 1928, Sergei Bryukhonenko revived a dog's head separated from the body. Without these experiences, modern resuscitation and transplantation would be impossible.

Recently, while browsing the feed of posts on Google+, I came across an entry with a photograph of a shabby and partially soaked archival document numbered P13/144. In a photograph yellowed by time (judging by the stamp, the document was declassified in the early nineties), people in white coats stand near a table on which a device is mounted that maintains life in the head of a collie dog. The dog's body is nearby, and, apparently, life in it was also forcibly preserved.

The author of the post asked the Google+ audience whether this document was a fake, the result of someone's crazy imagination and the same skills in handling graphics processing tools. Most of the debaters believed that this was pure fake. Looking at the half-erased seal of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the stamp "Top Secret" on the document, which was used only in party office work, I thought with a sinful deed about the reality of the events captured in the photo, especially since memory helpfully tossed up facts about the "war of heads" that was waged between the USSR and the USA in sixties and seventies.

Meanwhile, another photographic document appeared in the discussion thread: a page from the book, which depicted the “V.R. Lebedev Life Saving Machine (ASZhL)” with the very dog ​​head of the Collie breed connected to it.

Life saving machine named after the mysterious Lebedev

The surname of the creator of the "machine" made me delve into history, looking for all the scientists who tried one way or another to breathe life into a dog's head separated from the body. True, I began with science fiction, remembering Belyaev's famous "Professor Dowell's Head".

Ioakim Petrov. "The problem of revitalization of organisms". We train on cats

In 1939, in the fifth issue of the journal "Children's Literature", Belyaev published an article "On My Works". This article was a response to criticism of his novel "Professor Dowell's Head". The reviewer of the novel, a certain comrade Rykalev, believed that there was nothing fantastic in Professor Dowell's Head, since the successful results of experiments on reviving dog heads conducted by the Soviet scientist Bryukhonenko are widely known.

In his article, Belyaev explained that he wrote a novel about the revival of the human head more than fifteen years ago, that is, in 1924, and that at that time none of the Soviet scientists even planned such experiments.
Alexander Belyaev

Moreover, such experiments were not done by the doctors on whose work Bryukhonenko relied. Belyaev calls their names: Professor I. Petrov, Chechulin and Mikhailovsky - and even refers to I. Petrov's article "Problems of Revival", published in Izvestia in 1937. Who is this professor I. Petrov, and what experiments did he conduct? I found the answer in the second issue of the journal "Science and Life" for 1939, where Professor I. R. Petrov from the Military Medical Academy of the Red Army named after S. M. Kirov published an article "The problem of reviving organisms" (which, as I understand it, was more detailed version of his work, published earlier in Izvestia).

The article by Ioakim Ivanov was mostly devoted to the problems of resuscitation

On the website of the Military Medical Academy named after S. M. Kirov, I found out that Joakim Romanovich Petrov in 1939 headed the Department of Pathological Physiology and for twenty-four years was its permanent leader. Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the SSR Major General Petrov made a great contribution to the development of domestic resuscitation. He was most famous for the development of a blood-substituting solution, still referred to as "Petrov's liquid", which saved many lives during the Great Patriotic War.

In his article "The Problem of Reviving Organisms," Ioakim Romanovich talks about the relevance of reviving humans and animals after the cessation of heartbeat and respiration, and also gives many examples of experiments that were carried out on cats. The descriptions of the experiments, it should be noted, are very frank by today's Greenpeace times ("... even in animals that were reanimated twice and three times after deathly strangulation...").

However, the article did not contain a word about experiments to revive a single animal's head. But there was a reference to the work of the French physiologist Brown-Séquard, who in 1848 revived organs and tissues by washing their blood vessels with blood. By the way, Belyaev also referred to Brown-Sekara in his article, mentioning that the Frenchman conducted the first imperfect experiments on reviving a dog's head back in the nineteenth century.

Charles Brown-Séquard. French professor Preobrazhensky

Surprisingly, the outstanding French physiologist, member of the British Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences of France Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard did not plan to become a doctor in his youth. Literature was his element. However, the writer Charles Nodier, to whom he showed his writings, dissuaded Brown-Séquard from engaging in literature. Not because the young man had no talent, but because writing did not bring enough money.

In his youth, Charles Brown-Séquard was a romantic by nature. Apparently, therefore, he firmly believed in the effectiveness of the "elixir of youth" invented by him.

Perhaps the world has lost a writer, but gained a passionate physiologist. Brown-Sequard proved himself to be very prolific (more than five hundred scientific papers) and a courageous scientist who was not afraid of criticism from his colleagues. In 1858, he shocked the scientific community by restoring vital functions to a dog's head that had been severed from its body. Brown-Séquard did this by passing arterial blood through the blood vessels of the head (the function of perfusion).

But Brown-Sequard was best known for his experiments on rejuvenating the body by introducing serum from the gonads of animals (dogs and rabbits). Brown-Séquard conducted these experiments on himself. At the same time, he was so convinced of their effectiveness that at the age of seventy-two he made a special report at a meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences, assuring his colleagues that his health after using the "elixir of youth" had improved significantly. The report caused a great sensation. Newspapermen introduced the term "rejuvenation". Of course, it is now obvious that self-hypnosis played the greatest role in improving the well-being of an aging scientist, but at that time his experiments were considered a breakthrough in the field of prolonging a person's active life. Most likely, it was the story of the "elixir of youth" by Brown-Sequard that inspired Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov to write the story "Heart of a Dog".

Brown-Sequard was one of the first head animators. But in the photo under discussion, we see a team of Soviet scientists. As we found out, the Soviet academician Ioakim Petrov did not deal with the resurrection of heads separated from the body. But in Belyaev's article there is another surname - Bryukhonenko.

Autojet by Sergey Bryukhonenko

The history of the creation of the first heart-lung machine (AIC) is connected with the name of Sergey Sergeevich Bryukhonenko. Forced to engage in practical surgery immediately after graduating from the medical faculty of Moscow State University (at that time the war was in full swing), Sergey Bryukhonenko set about trying to maintain the life support of the body and its individual organs by organizing artificial blood circulation in them.

This idea was embodied in the autojet device, which Bryukhonenko and his colleagues developed and patented in 1925.
FROMSergey Bryukhonenko's autojet patent page

It was to demonstrate the capabilities of the autojector that Bryukhonenko conducted his famous experiment with the revival of a dog's head. Using rubber tubes, an autojector imitating a heart was connected to the amputated animal's head in the systemic circulation and to the amputated lungs in the pulmonary circulation. In 1928, the revived dog's head was demonstrated by Bryukhonenko to the scientific community. The head reacted to external stimuli and even ate the cheese offered to it!
The unique experience of Sergei Bryukhonenko "lit up" even in the Marvel comics of that time

The results of Bryukhonenko's sensational experiment were immediately presented by ideologues as an unconditional victory for Soviet science. It was they who were used by Comrade Rykalev, criticizing the novel by Alexander Belyaev. But, of course, the main merit of the invention of Sergei Bryukhonenko is that for the first time in practice the principle of artificially maintaining the life of the body and individual organs was implemented, without which modern resuscitation and transplantology are inconceivable.

Separately living dog's head, made by Sergey Bryukhonenko

Sergei Sergeevich Bryukhonenko actively worked on improving the device he created, working in the forties in the laboratory of experimental pathology at the Sklifosovsky Moscow Institute for Emergency Medicine, and later at the Research Institute of Experimental Surgical Equipment and Instruments. In 1965, he was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize for the development of an artificial blood circulation system.

But not all "animal heads" fate was so favorable. An example of this is the fate of the great experimenter Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov, whom transplantologists around the world deservedly consider their teacher.

Vladimir Demikhov. twenty two-headed dogs

The talent of an experimenter manifested itself in Vladimir Demikhov during his student days. In 1937, as a student of the physiological department of the biological faculty of Moscow State University, Demikhov independently manufactured an apparatus that can now be called an artificial heart. A physiology student tested his development on a dog that lived with Demikhov's artificial heart for about two hours.

Then there was the war and work as a pathologist. And the dream is to help dying people by transplanting them with new vital organs. In the period from 1946 to 1950, Vladimir Demikhov, working at the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Surgery, performed a number of unique operations, performing the world's first heart, lung and liver transplantation on animals. In 1952, he developed the coronary artery bypass grafting technique that is now saving thousands of lives.
More than twenty two-headed dogs were created in the laboratory of Vladimir Demikhov

Demonstrating the refinement and effectiveness of the techniques he developed, Demikhov performs a unique operation in a year to transplant a dog's head onto the body of another dog. Later, in his laboratory, Demikhov will create more than twenty two-headed dogs, practicing on them the method of connecting blood vessels and nervous tissue.

However, the obvious achievements of Demikhov were perceived far from being unambiguous. Working at the first Moscow Medical Institute named after I.M. Sechenov, Vladimir Petrovich, due to disagreements with the directorate of the institute, was never able to defend his dissertation on the topic "Transplantation of vital organs in the experiment." Meanwhile, his book of the same name became a bestseller in many countries of the world and for a long time was the only textbook on practical transplantology.

In 1965, Demikhov's report on organ transplantation (including heads) in dogs, made by him at a meeting of the section of transplantologists, was subjected to severe criticism and was called nonsense and pure charlatanism. Until the end of his life, Vladimir Petrovich was persecuted by his Soviet "colleagues" in the shop. And this despite the fact that Christian Bernard, the first surgeon who performed a human heart transplant, visited Demikhov's laboratory twice before his operation and considers him his teacher.

It is with the name of Vladimir Demikhov that the same "race of heads" is connected, which began in the sixties between the USSR and the USA in parallel with the "space race".
Dr. Robert White

In 1966, the US government began funding the work of Cleveland General Hospital surgeon Robert White. In March 1970, White successfully performed an operation to transplant the head of one monkey onto the body of another.

By the way, as in the case of Demikhov, White's work in the United States was severely criticized. And if Soviet ideologists accused Vladimir Petrovich of trampling on communist morality, then White was "hung" for violating the monopoly of God's providence. Until the end of his life, White raised funds for a human head transplant operation. He even had a volunteer - a paralyzed Craig Vetovitz.

Collie Project. The final

Well, what about the archival document from which my investigation began, and the "life saving machine named after V. R. Lebedev"?



Of course, it all turned out to be fake. But falsification in the best sense of the word. These documents are the result of work carried out within the framework of the creative computer graphics project "Collie". Only a frankly paranoid person can consider the use of a "life-saving machine" to create a Soviet cyborg collie as true.

Fake? Definitely. Only here it is based on the fate of real people. Experimenters who were not afraid to turn Belyaev's fantasy story into reality.
Well, what about the archival document from which my investigation began, and the "life saving machine named after V. R. Lebedev"?

1958 Collie Project. Robot-cyborg of the USSR!

1958 - the height of the Cold War, the arms race and the beginning of the USSR's top-secret project to create a cyborg robot. A lot of specialists from all fields were involved in it. And the point was to place the head of the pilot in a completely mechanical body of the robot, which would control it!
The late 50s - early 60s of the last century was a time of significant achievements in the field of scientific experiments around the world, including in the USSR. In those years, Soviet scientists began their experiments on animals. A whole series of such experiments was carried out within the walls of the University of Moscow and the Academy of Sciences. Already in 1950, Russian scientist Vladimir Demidov surprised the whole world by transplanting the head of one dog onto the body of another. The two-headed dog lived for a whole month.
With the beginning of the Cold War, all the efforts of Soviet science were aimed at creating the perfect weapon. In 1958, a secret Soviet project was created to create a cyborg robot. The scientific consultant of the project was the Nobel laureate V.Manuilov. Designers, doctors and engineers also worked on the project. Mice, rats and dogs have been used for experiments in which scientists tried to find out their safety for humans. Monkeys were also considered during the experiments, but dogs were ultimately chosen because they were easier to train and were calmer. Therefore, this project was called "Collie" and lasted almost 10 years. On January 4, 1969, by decree of the Central Committee, the Collie project was closed and all data on it were classified.
in 1991 this data was declassified.


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