Soviet biorobot project: true or fake?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In a photograph that has turned yellow with time (judging by the postmark, the document was declassified in the early nineties) people in white coats stand near a table on which a device is mounted that supports the life in the head of a collie dog. The dog's body is nearby, and, apparently, life in it is also forcibly preserved.

This is the information that accompanies this photo on the Internet: the 50-60s in the world passed under the sign of significant scientific achievements and daring experiments. The two superpowers, the USSR and the USA, were in preparation for a possible war, initiating military developments in every possible way. It was believed that ordinary soldiers would not be able to withstand a nuclear war, unlike cyborgs.

In the late 50s, Russian scientist Vladimir Demikhov surprised the scientific world by transplanting a dog's head to another dog. In 1958, a project to create a biorobot began.

Doctors, engineers, and even Nobel Prize laureate V. Manuilov worked together as a team to implement the project. Mice, rats, dogs and monkeys were proposed as a biological component of the biorobot. The choice fell on dogs, they are calmer and more agreeable than primates, especially since the USSR has accumulated a wealth of experience in experiments on dogs. The project was named "Collie" and ran for 10 years, but later the secret project was closed by decree of January 4, 1969. All data on it were classified as "Strictly Secret" and were a state secret until recently. In 1991, all data on the COLLY project were declassified …"

What's this? Was there such an experiment and what did it lead to? Now we will try to find out …

Meanwhile, another photographic document is circulating on the Internet: a page from a book, which depicted “a life preserving machine named after V. R. Lebedev (ASZhL) "with the same collie dog head connected to it. Many reading people will immediately recall the famous Belyaev's "The Head of Professor Dowell". But this is a sensation! Even with a dog's head.

Plus, here's another photo from the same sources.

This is how this story began …

In 1939, in the fifth issue of the magazine "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 revitalization 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 gives 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. work previously published in Izvestia).

On the website of the S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy, you can find out that Joachim Romanovich Petrov in 1939 headed the Department of Pathological Physiology and for twenty-four years was its permanent leader. Major General Petrov, Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the SSR, made a great contribution to the development of Russian intensive care. He was best known for the development of a blood-replacing solution, still referred to as "Petrov's fluid", which saved many lives during the Great Patriotic War.

The article by Joachim Ivanov was largely devoted to the problems of resuscitation.

In his article "The problem of revitalizing organisms" Joachim 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 today's Greenpeace times ("… even in animals that have undergone two and three times revival after mortal strangulation …").

However, the article did not contain a word about experiments to revive a single animal's head. But there was a link to the work of the French physiologist Brown-Séquard, who in 1848 revived organs and tissues by flushing 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.

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

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

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

But Brown-Sekar received the greatest fame for experiments on rejuvenating the body by introducing serum from the gonads of animals (dogs and rabbits). Brown-Sekar carried out 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 well-being after using the "elixir of youth" had significantly improved. The report caused a lot of hype. Newspapers introduced the term "rejuvenation". Of course, now it is obvious that the greatest role in improving the well-being of an aging scientist was played by self-hypnosis, but at that time his experiments were considered a breakthrough in the field of prolonging the active life of a person. Most likely, it was the story of the “elixir of youth” by Brown-Sekar that inspired Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov to write the story “Heart of a Dog”.

Brown-Sekar was one of the first head animators. But in the photo under discussion we see a collective of Soviet scientists. As we found out, the Soviet academician Joachim Petrov did not engage in the resurrection of the heads separated from the body. But in the article by Belyaev there is another surname - Bryukhonenko.

The history of the creation of the first heart-lung machine (AIC) is associated with the name of Sergei 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), Sergei Bryukhonenko fired up the idea of maintaining the life support of the body and its individual organs by organizing artificial circulation in them.

This idea was embodied in an auto-light device, which Bryukhonenko and his colleagues developed and patented in 1925.

The works of Soviet scientists in the first half of the 20th century in the field of biology and physiology were distinguished by an amazing boldness of ideas, exciting experiments, and a rare perspective, even according to today's ideas. The main focus of research at that time was the fight against death and attempts to revive the body.

The scientific basis was a whole series of old works with isolated organs. Biologists have become convinced that a piece of the heart of a chicken embryo can rhythmically contract for a very long time in an artificial environment. The organs of the "simplest" organisms can be so unpretentious and viable that, even being cut off from the whole organism, they continue to live and develop. Hydra gets its legendary name precisely because of this feature, and the severed beam of the starfish gives rise to a whole new starfish. And all this is in the most ordinary conditions of the existence of these organisms.

The first stunning results have appeared. The brilliant surgeon Vladimir Demikhov successfully transplanted hearts from one dog to another. Dr. Suga from Krasnodar demonstrated a dog whose kidney was sewn on its neck and excreted urine (the dog did not have its own kidneys). The famous professor Kulyabko revived the head of a fish by passing a solution containing salt in blood ratios through the vessels of the head, and the isolated head of the fish functioned. He was the first in the world to revive the human heart in the form of an isolated organ. In parallel, work was underway to revitalize the whole organism.

But the most daring works belonged to Sergei Sergeevich Bryukhonenko. The problem of life extension worried him since his student days. Building on the work of his predecessors, he set himself the task of doing experiments with an isolated dog's head.

The main task was to ensure normal blood circulation, since even a short-term violation of it causes irreversible processes in the brain and death. Then, with his own hands, he designed the first heart-lung machine, called an auto-light. The device was analogous to the heart of warm-blooded animals and carried out two circles of blood circulation with the help of electric motors. The role of arteries and veins in this apparatus was played by rubber tubes, which were connected in a large circle to the head of a dog, and in a small circle to isolated animal lungs.

In 1928, at the third congress of physiologists of the USSR, Bryukhonenko demonstrated the revitalization of a dog's head isolated from the body, whose life was maintained with the help of a heart-lung machine. To prove that the head on the table was alive, he showed how it reacts to stimuli. Bryukhonenko hit the table with a hammer, and his head shuddered. He shone a light into her eyes, and his eyes blinked. He even fed a piece of cheese to his head, which immediately popped out of the esophageal tube at the other end.

In his notes, Bryukhonenko wrote:

Particularly intense movements followed irritation of the nasal mucosa with a probe inserted into the nostril. Such irritation caused such a vigorous and prolonged reaction from the head lying on the plate that bleeding began from the wounded surface and the tubes attached to its vessels were nearly cut off. At the same time, I had to hold my head on the plate with my hands. It seemed that the head of the dog wanted to free itself from the probe inserted into the nostril. The head opened its mouth wide several times, and the impression was created, according to the expression of Professor A. Kulyabko, who observed this experiment, that it seemed to be trying to bark and howl.

This experiment marked the beginning of a new era in medicine. It became clear that the revival of the human body after the onset of clinical death is as real as open-heart surgery, organ transplantation and the creation of an artificial heart.

The results of the sensational experiment of Bryukhonenko were immediately presented by ideologists as an unconditional victory for Soviet science. It was them that comrade Rykalev used when criticizing the novel by Alexander Belyaev. But, of course, the main merit of Sergey Bryukhonenko's invention lies in the fact that for the first time in practice the principle of artificially supporting the life of the body and individual organs was implemented, without which modern resuscitation and transplantology are inconceivable.

Foreign newspapers wrote about the success of the Russian surgeon. The famous writer Bernard Shaw, in a letter to one of his correspondents, spoke about the work of Sergei Bryukhonenko as follows:

Madam, I find Bryukhonenko's experiment extremely interesting, but I cannot imagine anything more rash than the proposal to test it on a criminal sentenced to death.

It is undesirable to prolong the life of such a person. The experiment must be carried out on a man of science, whose life is endangered due to an incurable organic disease - for example, stomach cancer - that threatens to deprive humanity of the results of his brain.

What could be easier than saving such a genius from death by having his head cut off, and freeing his brain from cancer, while the necessary blood circulation will be maintained through the circumcised arteries and veins of his neck, so that the great man can continue to read to us lectures, teach us, give us advice, without being bound by the imperfections of your body.

I feel the temptation to let my head be cut off myself, so that I can henceforth dictate plays and books so that illness does not interfere with me, so that I don’t have to dress and undress, so that I don’t need to eat, so that I don’t have to do anything. other than producing dramatic and literary masterpieces.

I would, of course, wait for one or two vivisectors to subject themselves to this experiment to make sure that it is practical and not dangerous, but I guarantee that there will be no further difficulties on my part.

I am very grateful to you for drawing my attention to such a joyful opportunity …

In subsequent years, the work consisted of improving the method of artificial circulation. There was a need to create an "artificial lung". S. S. Bryukhonenko together with Professor V. D. Yankovsky has developed a continuous system "artificial heart - lung". On the one hand, it ensured full blood circulation in the body, and on the other hand, full gas exchange, replacing the lungs.

Excerpt from the "Red Studies" article in Time magazine, November 22, 1943:

A thousand American scientists in Manhattan last week watched as dead animals were brought back to life. It was the first public American screening of a film depicting an experiment by Soviet biologists. They drained the blood from the dog. Fifteen minutes after her heart stopped beating, they pumped blood back into her lifeless body using an apparatus called an auto-light, which serves as an artificial heart and lungs. Soon the dog began to stir, began to breathe, its heart began to beat. Twelve hours later, she was on her feet, wagging her tail, barking, fully recovered. (…)

The auto-light, a relatively simple machine, has a vessel ("lung") in which blood is supplied with oxygen, a pump that circulates oxygenated blood through the arteries, another pump that draws blood from the veins back to the "lung" for more oxygen. The other two dogs on which the experiment was performed in 1939 are still alive and well. It can also keep a dog's heart beating, outside of its body, support the severed head of the dog for hours - the head raised its ears in the noise and licked its mouth when it was smeared with citric acid. But the machine is not capable of recovering a whole dog more than 15 minutes after it has been exsanguinated - the somatic cells then begin to disintegrate.

In 1942, during the very difficult months of the Great Patriotic War, at the Moscow Institute of Emergency Medicine named after V. I. Sklifosovsky Research Institute for Emergency Medicine, a laboratory of experimental pathology was created. The first heads of the laboratory were professors S. S. Bryukhonenko and B. C. Troitsky. Under the leadership of Bryukhonenko, conditions for preserving blood were developed, which made it possible to preserve it for two to three weeks, which was extremely important in helping the wounded.

Since 1951 S. S. Bryukhonenko took part in the organization of the new Research Institute of Experimental Surgical Equipment and Instruments, where he was first deputy director for the medical department, and then headed the physiological laboratory. Since 1958 S. S. Bryukhonenko headed the artificial blood circulation laboratory of the Institute of Experimental Biology and Medicine of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

In 1960, Sergei Sergeevich Bryukhonenko died at the age of 70. During his life, he patented dozens of inventions in various fields, which undoubtedly made a huge contribution to the development of domestic science. For the scientific substantiation and development of the problem of artificial circulation, Doctor of Medical Sciences S. S. Bryukhonenko in 1965 was posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize.

It is impossible to imagine modern medicine without the method of artificial circulation. But, unfortunately, in everyday practice, doctors do not use the Bryukhonenko device: like many Russian ideas, this one was picked up by Western scientists and brought there to perfect industrial designs.

In Moscow, at house No. 51 on Prospect Mira, there is a nondescript memorial plaque, and almost none of the people passing by knows how the great Russian scientist Sergei Bryukhonenko, who lived here, made the world happy.

By the way, it was S. S. Bryukhonenko.

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

The talent of an experimenter manifested itself in Vladimir Demikhov even during his student days. In 1937, being 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. The 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 new vital organs to them. 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, which now saves thousands of lives.

Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov, an experimental scientist, the founder of world transplantology, performed an experimental transplant of a dog's head.

Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov was born on July 18, 1916 in Russia on the Kulini farm (the territory of the present-day Volgograd region) in a peasant family. Studied at FZU as a mechanic-repairman. In 1934 V. Demikhov entered the Physiological Department of the Faculty of Biology at Moscow State University and began his scientific career very early. During the war years, he fulfills the duties of a pathologist. Immediately after the war, he came to the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Surgery.

In 1946, for the first time in the world, Demikhoim successfully transplanted a second heart to a dog, and soon he was able to completely replace the cardiopulmonary complex, which became a world sensation that was not even noticed in the USSR. Two years later, he began experiments on liver transplants, and a few years later, for the first time in the world, he replaced a dog's heart with a donor one. This proved the possibility of carrying out such an operation on a person.

The attention of the scientific community was attracted by the experiments of Demikhov (1950) on homoplastic replacement of the heart and lungs. They were performed in four stages - preparation of the donor heart and lungs for transplantation; preparation of the chest and vessels of the recipient; removing the heart and lungs from the donor and transferring them to the recipient's chest (with the maintenance of artificial respiration in the graft); connection of blood vessels of the graft, shutdown and removal of one's own heart. The life expectancy of dogs after transplantation reached 16 hours.

Demikhov, with the participation of his assistants A. Fatin and V. Goryainov, proposed in 1951 an original method of preserving isolated organs. For this purpose, the entire complex of internal organs (heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, gastrointestinal tract) was used together with the circulatory and lymphatic systems. To maintain the vital functions of such a complex of organs, only artificial ventilation of the lungs and a constant ambient temperature (38-39 ° C) were required. The next important achievement was the world's first mammary-coronary bypass grafting (1952 - 1953). Coronary artery bypass grafting is a complex surgical operation that allows you to restore blood flow in the arteries of the heart by bypassing the narrowing of the coronary vessel using shunts.

Considerable interest was aroused by the transplantation of the head of a dog, which was carried out by Demikhov together with Goryainov in 1954.

In 1956, Demikhov wrote a dissertation on the topic of transplantation of vital organs. In it, he analyzes the results of his own experiments. They were amazing: the dogs, made up of two halves, lived for several weeks. The defense was supposed to take place at the First Medical Institute, but the defense did not take place: the author was considered a dreamer, and his work was not worthy of attention.

Demikhov developed a method for transplanting the head together with the forelimbs from a puppy onto the neck of an adult dog. In this case, the puppy's aortic arch was connected to the dog's carotid artery, and its superior vena cava was connected to the dog's jugular vein. As a result, blood circulation in the transplanted head was completely restored, it retained its functions and all inherent reflexes.

At the same time, he made a total replacement of blood in dogs, sheep and pigs with human cadaveric blood - with the aim of antigenic rapprochement of these animals with humans. After that, he connected human cadaveric hearts to their circulatory system. Using this technique, Demikhov was able to revive the cadaverous hearts of a person 2, 5 - 6 hours after death and maintain them in a functioning state for a long period of time. The best results were obtained using a pig as an intermediate host. Thus, Demikhov was the first to create a bank of living organs.

One can only marvel at the steadfastness of Vladimir Petrovich, who continued to experiment, despite the fact that in the period of intense scientific research, countless commissions were appointed, the purpose of which was to prove the uselessness of experiments and to close the laboratory. Only in 1963, Demikhov, and in one day, was able to defend two dissertations at once (candidate and doctoral).

Demonstrating the refinement and effectiveness of the techniques he developed, Demikhov in 1954 carried out 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 technique of connecting blood vessels and nervous tissue.

However, Demikhov's obvious achievements were not perceived unambiguously. Working at the first Moscow Medical Institute named after I. M. Sechenov, Vladimir Petrovich, due to disagreements with the management of the institute, was unable to defend his thesis on "Transplantation of vital organs in an 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 transplantation.

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

The laboratory under the direction of Demikhov worked until 1986. Methods for transplantation of the head, liver, adrenal glands with a kidney, esophagus, and extremities were developed. The results of these experiments have been published in scientific journals. Demikhov's works have received international recognition. He was awarded the title of Honorary Doctor of Medicine of the University of Leipzig, Honorary Member of the Royal Scientific Society of Sweden, as well as the University of Hanover, the American clinic of the Mayo brothers. He is the holder of honorary diplomas from scientific organizations around the world. And in our country - only a laureate of the "departmental" prize named after N. N. Burdenko, awarded by the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR.

Demikhov died in obscurity and poverty. Only shortly before his death, he was awarded the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, III degree. The merit that brought this belated recognition, most likely, was the development of coronary artery bypass grafting.

It is with the name of Vladimir Demikhov that the very "race of heads" is associated, which began in the sixties between the USSR and the United States in parallel with the "space race".

In 1966, the US government began funding the work of Robert White, a surgeon at Cleveland Central Hospital. 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 violating communist morality, White was “hung” for violating the monopoly of divine 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.

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

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

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

Well, let's finish this exposure on a creative note. In general, here it is the photoshop project itself:

The legend of the creative project says: In 2010, the scientific achievements of the Soviet scientists of the Collie project were applied to save the life of my dog. In the autumn of the same year, my parents went on an excursion to the city of Suzdal. They took their dog with them. Her name is Charma, but we call her "Collie" because she will never be the same.