Frankenstein and his monster ever since publication has fascinated popular culture.
In a book that was originally a warning on the potential horrors of unchecked Victorian
scientific discovery, would go on to inspire numerous studies.
In a case of life imitating art in the Modern day we possess surgical abilities that would
be not out of place in Mary Shelley’s work.
One of the ultimate goals is that of reviving the dead, a skill that would truly prove man
to have the abilities of god.
Needless to say this has resulted in a number of experiments and one such would become infamous
and even manage to filter its way into pop culture in a number of ways.
The experiment would be filmed, translated into English and distributed and would become
referenced in multiple books including work from roald dahl, tv shows and even music.
My name is John, today we are looking at the 1940 revival of organisms film and its background,
my rating will be at the end, welcome to the dark side of Science.
Background Student to Scientist via war hero.
Our story starts long before the 1940s and even the Soviet Union, with the birth of a
future surgical pioneer.
Sergei Sergeevich Brukhonenko Bruk-Honen-Ko was born on the 30 April 1890 in Kozlov, modern
day Michurinsk, to a family of a civil engineer.
Brukhonenko showed promise from a young age where as seen in this photo he designed and
built his own bicycle in his teenage years.
He would enroll at a college in Saratov for his pre medical education after which moving
to the Medical Faculty of the University of Moscow for his further education.
Brukhonenko would graduate as a doctor in 1914, this should have been the start to a
long hospital career, but world politics would intervene with the start of the 1st world
war.
Needless to say there was a need for medical staff to deal with the never ending pile of
casualties as such he was brought into active duty with the army as a junior doctor.
During his service he would see the horrific injuries that war can inflict.
The experiences he gained in treating wounds would influence Brukhonenko to explore different
concepts of keeping a patient alive after injuries to major organs and arteries with
extracorporeal circulation.
As a side note that will make a load of sense for the later experiments in Brukhonenko’s
career, extracorporeal circulation is, and here comes my dictionary again, Circulation
of the blood outside the body, as through a heart-lung machine or artificial kidney.
His career in the army would end abruptly when the Russian empire pulled out of the
1st world war to deal with some internal issues and regicide.
He would return to Moscow in autumn 1917 working for the Sanitary Council of Sokol-niki.
In 1919 he would change jobs working at the Military Hospital in Lefor-tovo just on the
outskirts of Moscow as the assistant professor in the Clinical Pathology department.
Again like during his war years he would experience a wide array of injuries and illnesses.
In 1923 Brukhonenko returned to his interest in extracorporeal circulation when he was
introduced to the drug Suramin, he discovered it could be used as an anticoagulant.
His experimentation at the time used roller pumps to perfect blood flow without the risk
of contamination.
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The autojector
Heart lung machines were a concept dating all the way back to Maximilian von Frey's
early prototype in 1885.
But the lack of anticoagulant drugs made the concept impossible to pull off, but as we
saw with Brukhonenko he had such a compatible drug.
3 years after his awareness of Suramin, Brukhonenko along with a colleague called Sergei Tchet-chulin,
who was once an apprentice physiologist Ivan Pavlov, had designed and built one of the
first feasible heart and lung machines, called the autojector.
The name to me sounds pretty nightmarish and to be honest how it works is pretty nightmarish
too, here's a summary of how the autojector keeps a subject alive.
Right well the first gruesome but interesting part of the machine is how it oxygenates the
blood it pumps, what is pretty efficient at doing this you might think?
Well it's the lungs, Bruk-honen-ko thought why try to better mother nature, and for his
autojektor he made use of real lungs.
Brukhonenko would employ excised lungs from a donor animal and used two mechanically operated
diaphragm pumps with a system of valves.
The first pump would deliver blood to the oxygenator, donor lungs, and the second pump
would return the now oxygenated blood back into the patient's body.
The experimental animal and donor animal were both injected with Suranim before the experiment,
to stop the blood from clotting.
Now Brukhonenko had the machine and the method he set about to test it out on November 1,
1926.
The experiment was to use dogs, the experimental dog was hooked up to the machine via the carotid
artery and jugular vein.
The autojector was switched on and adjusted to pump blood at the same flow rate as the
dogs heart working in parallel that Bryukhonenko named “parallel circulation.”
A ligature was tied around its heart to stop it from beating, at which point the Autojector
was switched off to allow the dog to go into cardiac arrest.
Once some time had passed the autojector was switched back on and total perfusion was archived.
The dog lived for around 2 hours after its heart stopped, the experiment was brought
to an end when the mammary artery burst, subsequently the dog died, but the concept was proven.
This experiment was the first of its type, and marked a milestone for providing blood
flow in a patent with an arrested heart.
In total 8 experiments would be conducted by Brukhonenko with his machine in 1926 and
the result would report that of successful death and bringing back to life.
He would later say on this series of experiments:
“In principle, the artificial circulation may be used for certain operations on the
arrested heart, however, further improvement of the technique is necessary for its practical
implementation”
And to improve he did, for the next fews years Brukhonenko experimented with both isolated
organs and total body perfusions, all using dogs.
He felt so confident in his method that in 1928 on June 1, he demonstrated the autojector
to the international audience at the 3rd Congress of Physiologists of the USSR.
A year later Brukhonenko would shock and wow the world with his work Studies on the Methods
of Artificial Blood Circulation and Blood Transfusion.
Where a severed dog head was kept alive, with it even reacting to its surroundings, opening
its mouth, and even swallowing a piece of cheese.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s the autojector was used for hypothermia based experiments,
where dogs would be cooled down to the point of cardiac arrest at a temperature of 3°C
then warmed back up with no long term damage to the subjects.
The machine would be further improved upon by creating artificial lungs via a bubble
oxygenator.
In 1939, in a series of experiments 12 out of 13 test animals were resuscitated using
the heart-lung machine after 10 minutes of circulatory arrest.
All the dogs that were brought back to life recovered completely without any apparent
neurological damage.
So confident and successful was Brukhonenko in the autojector that he decided to show
it off in the now infamous movie, Experiments in the Revival of Organisms.
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The Film.
The short movie was intended to showcase the pinnacle of Soviet scientific experimentation
into extracorporeal circulation.
Now I must say it is worth watching the film in full. It's only 20 minutes or so, and when
I watched it I had mixed feelings, not only because seeing various dogs being used as
test subjects but because well we will discuss that in a bit.
The movie successively ramps up the use of the autojector and exhibits various experiments,
which had been undertaken during the late 1930s.
Firstly we are greeted with an isolated heart pumping with the help of an artificial lung,
it circulated blood through various tubes and seems to be working rather well outside
of its body.
Next we are shown a lung oxygenating blood, via bellows.
Then we are greeted with what seems to be a disembodied dog head connected up to the
autojector, we are shown via cartoon the connections between it and Brukhonenko’s machine.
This part and the next are considered to be the most controversial.
Its eyes are poked and it is shown being stimulated by being poked, citric acid is placed around
the dog's mouth and it is seen licking its lips.
Other stimuli are used, with a spotlight being shone on the dog's face and a hammer bangning
on the table, both of which produce what looks to be an unapproving face.
And as part of a grand finale Brukhonenko in his film was to revive the dead.
A dog is shown on an operating table, it had been given Surinam and an anesthetic.
The blood is then drained from the dog causing cardiac arrest, after which the blood is put
in a container and then fed into the autojector.
Now that the dog is drained of blood and dead, 10 minutes is waited, during this time the
machine is hooked up to the now deceased animal.
At roughly 10 minutes after death, the autojector is powered up and the pumping of warm oxygenated
blood begins.
Low and behold the dog's heartbeat is shown starting up then not long after it takes its
first breath post revival.
The dog is seen post experiment lying down looking sorry for itself, then around 10 days
later it seems to be acting as if back to normal.
The film ends with several dogs being shown to have also been killed to be brought back
to life, one of whom was dead for a reported 15 minutes, some even had gone on to have
puppies.
The film was filmed at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, in Moscow, and was
designed to try and appeal to as wid of an audience as possible with its diagrammatic
explanation of the experiments and the autojector.
To add a level of believability to the production British scientist J. B. S. Haldane introduced
the English language version of the film, claiming to have witnessed all the experiments
personally.
The film was distributed across the US by the National Council of American–Soviet
Friendship, a not surprisingly communist socialist sympathetic group.
Now the movie shocked many that saw it, and impressed others, working its way into American
pop culture, but the film is most likely a propaganda piece with its experiments staged.
It is thought by many including myself that it is likely that the final two most shocking
experiments were faked for the film.
When the beheaded dog is introduced to stimuli the way it moves looks like it’s still anchored
to something it even at one point looks to turn around.
Something I would think is impossible without a body.
For the final revival scene the heart of the then dead dog is not shown any type of restarting
by massaging or electro shocking.
Instead just re oxygenated blood is all that’s needed.
But although possible for the film it was faked it doesn’t mean It didn’t happen….maybe
the film makers decided to omit the more intricate details of bringing back a dead dog.
For the dog head again it is possible in theory to happen and there are several accounts of
earlier experiments being showcased, with even photographic evidence of a separated
dog head attached to the autojector.
For example when Brukhonenko exhibited his head experiment in 1928 to western scientists
and released his findings in Brukhonenko S.S. Tchechulin S.I. “Experiments on isolation
of dog’s head.”
My theory is maybe it was faked because the stimuli reactions weren’t as impressive
in the real experiments as that shown in the film.
Some of the biggest red flags are that the experiment wasn’t shown in full frame and
connecting the autojector wasn’t shown.
Reportedly some of the witnesses claimed that when they had seen the head experiment previously
it only lasted a couple of minutes not the hours claimed in the film.
We also need to bear in mind the period in which the film was produced, in which propaganda
was rife in the Stalinist Soviet Union.
Possibly the film was presented for dramatic effect and maybe the actual results weren’t
as striking although still fascinating for the camera.
It should also be stated that the apparent credible witness J. B. S. Haldane was an ardent
Stalin supporter and a vocal communist.
Aftermath
Scientist and co worker of Brukhonenko, Nikolai Terebinski (1880–1959) published a monograph
and reported excellent results of more than 260 open heart operations on dogs in 1940,
demonstrating the viability of the device for use on humans.
After going as far as he could with dogs Brukhonenko and his colleague Terebinski sought to test
out the autojector on a human subject, but war again would scupper the scientists' plans.
Operation Barbarossa was unleashed by nazi germany on the Soviet Union and by 1945 10s
of millions would be dead and many parts of the country would be left in ruins.
Between the end of the war and 1951 Brukhonenko was sent to work at Sklifo-sovsky Emergency
Institute in Moscow.
During this period he had little chance to develop the autojector, but in the early 50s
he returned to testing out his device.
Between 1951 to 1958, Brukhonenko was the head of the physiology laboratory at the Institute
of Experimental Surgical Devices and Instruments in Moscow.
He put forward his device for the revival of patents of sudden death, but after a number
of attempts the machine failed to resuscitate any subjects.
Time was running out for A Soviet extracorporeal circulation machine, although Brukhonenko
also suggested his machine would work for open heart surgery the pioneering autojector
would be eclipsed by John Heysham Gibbon, when on May 6, 1953, he was able to perform
the first successful human open heart procedure using his own machine.
The final nails in the coffin of the Soviet autojector came when Nikolai Terebinskis died
in 1959, by now Brukhonenko was the head of the laboratory of Artificial Circulation at
the Institute of Experimental Biology and Medicine.
But just a year after Nikolai, Brukhonenko himself would pass away on April 20, 1960.
In 1965, Bryukhonenko posthumously received the Lenin Prize, the highest scientific award
in the Soviet Union.
The autojektor would die with both men and their leaps forward would be largely forgotten
to time, but the film released in 1940 would serve as a record of the experiment, falling
into the public domain.
The machine was a crude method of total perfusion, and the series of experiments resulted in
a countless number of dead dogs.
The experiments are remarkably similar to the Vladimir Demikhov double dog head studies
and the monkey head transplants I covered in the first dark side of science video.
Although animal testing like this makes me uncomfortable, the experiements were working
towards an admirable goal, far less the mad scientist trope in which the film watched
without context invokes.
I’m going to rate this subject around a 5 or 6 as killing dogs is bad but the scientific
discovery was really impressive. Where would you rate this subject 1 is ethical and 9 is
truly evil?
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Attribution-ShareAlike. Plainly difficult videos are produced by me
John, in a sunny Southeastern corner of london, uk.
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https://www.salon.com/2013/06/14/russians_who_raised_the_dead/
https://www.annalsthoracicsurgery.org/article/S0003-4975(00)01091-2/fulltext
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2743238/#R37
https://journals.lww.com/asaiojournal/fulltext/2018/01000/bryukhonenko_s_autojector__the_first_apparatus_for.21.aspx