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In this video a dog's head is brought back to life by artificially injecting blood and air. The dog's head reacted to sound and touch and used its tongue to taste.

I am not skeptic about its possibility, but I am skeptic if it was possible in 1940.

Links and sources:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms
Youtube Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSrIkUXwsNk
Youtube Part 2 (killing and reviving a dog): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjBa6scGIPQ
Dog head robot: http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/03files/Russian_Experiment_Dead_Dog.html

Barry Harrison
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smUsamaShah
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    i know this is an old questuon, but perhaps OP is still at large: could you define more accurately what you accept as 'back to life'? muscles of dead animals can be made to twitch if immersed in a physiologic solution, and stimulated - nerves, especially severed ones will provide such stimulus if themselves immersed. but the 'to taste' part implies intent rather than reflex - this is much more improbable after oxygen deprivation of brain for 10 minutes... – bukwyrm May 19 '19 at 07:37

1 Answers1

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In answer to the question

if [what is depicted in linked video] was really possible in 1940?

The answer is unequivocally YES - in fact quite a bit earlier. Reanimating a severed head was hypothesised in 1812, first attempted in 1857 and, for the most part, perfected in 1928-29.

In 1812, French Physiologist Julian Jean Cesar Legallois hypothesised that a head could theoretically be kept alive in isolation from its body by maintaining a supply of blood. However this hypothesis was not tested until 1857 when Dr Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard lopped off the head of a dog, drained the blood and after 10 minutes injected fresh blood back into the arteries. He reported signs of life displaying what appeared to be voluntary movements of the eyes and face. This continued for a few minutes until the head once again "died".

Source: Brown-Séquard, E (1858) L'encephale, apres avoir complement perdu ses fonctions et ses proprietes vitales peut les recouvrer sous l'influence de sand change d'oxygene. Jounal de la physiologie de l'homme et des animaux.

Similar research continued with Dr Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde who was first to fill a severed human head with blood. The results were disappointing, nothing much happened. Laborder blamed this on the delay between getting the head from the gallows (The subject was reported to be a murderer named "Campi") to his labratory.

Laborde subsequently tried again, this time on the murderer "Gagny" whose head he received a mere 7 minutes post-mortem. By 18 minutes he had connected the carotid artery to that of a still-living dog. Laborde reported that the facial muscles contracted, while the jaw snapped violently shut. No signs of conciousness were reported.

Around the same time, Paul Loye (A collegue of Laborde) erected a guillotine in his office and used it to decaptitate hundreds of dogs in order to study their reaction After Laborde and Loye, a handful of doctors pursued this line of research but for real breakthroughs the world needed to wait until the late 1920s when Soviet Physician Sergei Brukhonenko succeeded in keeping the isolated head of a dog alive for three hours. What made this possible was the use of anti-coagulant drugs and a primative heart-lung machine (developed by Brukhonenko) which he called an autojector.

Source: Brukhonenko, S (1929). Experiences avec la tete isolee du chien II: Resultats des experiences. Journal de physiologie et de pathologie generale.

Which leads us back to the question. In 1940 a film was released detailing the work of Dr S.S Brukhonenko and entitled "Experiments in the Revival of Organisms". Dr Brukhonenko is credited with Writing and Technical Direction roles.

A remaining question is whether the video in question is an accurate depiction of the very real scientific work of Brukhonenko et al. The answer to that question, I am still looking for references!

Much of this answer has been researched with help of the (rather fun) book: Elephants on Acid (ISBN:9781743291870)

Jamiec
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  • Don't they put the dog's head back on its body and its running around healthy at the end of the video? I think that's the main issue with it. – Razie Mah Apr 22 '14 at 23:21
  • @RazieMah No, they bring a dog to clinical death and then revive it as far as I could tell. There was no head removal in that part of the experiments/video. – Jamiec Apr 23 '14 at 07:59
  • Are there any reports of similar experiments in this time? This experiment can be repeated on more complex animals now with greater chance of success (ignore the ethical grounds). – smUsamaShah Apr 23 '14 at 11:23
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    @LifeH2O: you cannot just "ignore the ethical grounds". Nowadays, and rightly so, if you don't have full ethical approval you are not able to experiment on animals. And you would have an incredible hard time getting approval to do something like that... – nico Apr 23 '14 at 18:04
  • The Russians also experimented with "head transplants" on dogs; they had similar success as detailed in this answer. –  Feb 14 '17 at 23:34
  • I have my suspicions about the reality of this video based on the swallowing movements around 1:30 in the video and the neck movement portrayed as a reaction to sound starting at 2:09. The movements and return to "neutral" positioning is indicative of neck muscles that would need to be attached further down from the apparent point where the head is severed. My guess is the rest of the dog is below the surface of the table, the dog is mostly sedated and that straps were used to secure both the body of the dog below the table and on the neck (hidden by the standing fur). – YLearn Mar 22 '18 at 22:56
  • @YLearn Thats fine, find some evidence and post it as an answer. I don't have hard evidence that the video itself is real - just that the theory and practice of what is depicted was being worked on. – Jamiec Mar 23 '18 at 07:35
  • If I had any actual evidence, I would have posted an answer. All I have is basic anatomy, knowing that muscles can’t work as intended if any of their anchor points/attachments are removed, plus that a dogs neck muscles extend rather far down their necks making neck movements as shown improbable at best (and most likely impossible). – YLearn Mar 23 '18 at 08:43
  • comments in the discussion thread here (http://www.thinkartificial.org/videos/the-severed-head-of-a-dog-kept-alive/) try to put some reasons as to why the video is a staged one to make the case appear true. – Istiaque Ahmed Nov 05 '18 at 19:15
  • @IstiaqueAhmed the question wasn't so much if the soviet dog experiment was true, it asked about how possible it was in 1940. This answer seeks to demonstrate that research had been done well prior to that date. – Jamiec Nov 06 '18 at 08:20
  • @Jamiec, You are right except that the title of the question seeks the veracity of the video while the body itself looks for different info. – Istiaque Ahmed Nov 06 '18 at 10:35