The first successful heart and lung transplants, as well as coronary bypass procedures, were born not in sleek Western clinics but in a modest Moscow institute of experimental surgery. Their author, Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov (1916–1998), built an improvised artificial cardiac assist device during World War II, and in 1946 demonstrated that a transplanted heart could beat in another dog’s chest for weeks.
But his remarkable results also led him to a daring (and today widely condemned) experiment: joining two living animals into a single circulatory system.
Operation No. 24: Brodyaga and Shavka
In the summer of 1959, Demikhov selected a large stray shepherd dog, which he named Brodyaga, and a small mixed-breed dog, Shavka. From the smaller dog he kept the head, neck, front legs, and thoracic organs; the rest he amputated. After three and a half hours of microsurgery, he connected the graft’s neck vessels and trachea to the host’s bloodstream. Both heads woke from anesthesia, reacted to sound, licked their muzzles, and Shavka even drank water (which, however, had nowhere to go, so it flowed back out). The life of this pair ended after four days due to a ruptured vein; another prototype, No. 6, survived 29 days.
Demikhov repeated the procedure a total of 24 times, but never came close to long-term function. Although the outcome astonished the editors of LIFE magazine, for medicine itself it brought more ethical debate than a practical technique.
Legacy in Transplantation
Despite the controversial dogs, Demikhov’s studies laid the groundwork for modern vascular suturing techniques, which enabled Christian Barnard, ten years later, to perform the first successful human heart transplants. Soviet authorities, however, kept his fame in check, and in the 1990s he died almost in anonymity.
When a Primate Attempted the Neck
American neurosurgeon Robert J. White picked up where Demikhov left off a decade later: in 1970 he transplanted the head of a rhesus macaque onto the body of another. The brain remained conscious, tracked objects with its eyes, and drank juice through a tube, but the spinal cord was not reconnected, so the animal was paralyzed and died after nine days from immune rejection.
A Chinese Challenge and the Italian “Dr. Frankenstein”
Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, together with orthopedist Ren Xiaoping (Harbin Medical University), claim that by combining deep brain hypothermia, nano-knives, and polyethylene glycol adhesive, they can sever and re-fuse the spinal cord in a single moment. After hundreds of thousands of trials in mice and initial tests on human cadavers, they announced their intention to attempt a live operation, though the date remains undisclosed due to resistance from ethics committees as well as technical limitations.
Neither Demikhov nor White managed to overcome two key problems: permanently reconnecting the spinal cord so the patient would not be paralyzed, and immune rejection. Today’s immunomodulatory protocols and genetically edited pig organs are changing the rules of the game, but linking tens of billions of nerve fibers with a single stroke of a scalpel remains a futuristic challenge.
Meanwhile, transplantation is moving in a different direction: in 2022 the first successful xenotransplants of a pig heart → human took place, and the development of lab-grown, 3D-bioprinted organs is advancing. If spinal-cord “glue” technology is ever proven, it is more likely to offer hope to people with spinal injuries than a full-body replacement.
Archival Footage of the Two-Headed Dog
References
- European Heart Journal: Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov (1916–1998) – pioneer of transplantation – https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/38/46/3406/4706202 Oxford Academic
- All That Is Interesting: “How Vladimir Demikhov Made A Two-Headed Dog” – https://allthatsinteresting.com/vladimir-demikhov-two-headed-dog All That’s Interesting
- Wikipedia: “Robert J. White” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._White Wikipedia
- Medical News Today: “The first human head transplant: plans and pitfalls” – https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/301073 Medical News Today
Robert
I’m interested in technology and history, especially true crime stories. For three years I ran a fact-based portal about modern history, and for a year I co-built a blogging platform where I published dozens of analytical articles. I founded offpitch so that quality content wouldn’t be hidden behind a paywall.
