<h1>Experiments in the Revival of Organisms</h1>
This disturbing film records the successful experiments in the resuscitation of life to dead animals (dogs), as conducted by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, Voronezh, U.S.S.R. Director: D.I. Yashin. Camera: E.V. Kashina. Narrator: Professor Walter B. Cannon. Introduced by Professor J.B.S. Haldane.
Sponsor: Soviet Film Agency
Producer: Techfilm Studio, Moscow
Audio/Visual: Sd, B&W
______________________________________________
In case you can't download or stream the video, here is what it was about. The American professor narrates over this Soviet-filmed footage. In the late 1930's this particular lab in the USSR was conducting experiments on dogs, specifically reviving isolated organs (hearts and lungs) from dead dogs, and then reviving a dog they had killed 10 minutes earlier on the lab table, using a device they called an Autojector. There are also animated diagrams of how the Autojector works before they show it actually in use. Of course, the footage was only of the successful experiments. After a basic overview of the circulatory and respiratory systems, we are shown the animation of the Autojector hooked up to a pair of dog lungs in a dish, and then later also a dog heart suspended over a dish. The device basically powers the circulation of blood and air and does all the necessary conversions between the two, to function just like the circ/resp system in tandem with the actual organ. There are tubes and valves and things hooked up to the organs, I'm not sure how they sealed them to the actual organ but that's kind of irrelevant. We see the heart beating, blood flowing through it; we see the lungs inflating and deflating, both at the correct rates for the dog who the organs came from.
The next part is where it gets kind of disturbing.... they do the same thing with a cute fluffy white dog's otherwise intact, but severed, head. I am not sure where they cut off its spinal cord, but apparently they left enough. I'll tell you why. They hooked its trachea, arteries, and veins and whatnot (please pardon my obvious lack of knowledge about the mammalian body here) to the Autojector, and turned the device on so that it is circulating blood and air through the dog's head and back. I am going to assume that the head had been anesthetised, but I'm not sure. They verify that it is breathing and blood is circulating. Then, to show that the whole head is functioning properly, they do several things. A feather is brushed across the dog's nose, and it visibly flinches, blinks its eyes, and jerks back as much as it can without a spinal cord and body and stuff. They swab citric acid on its nose and mouth, and the dog (dog's head? it's not a whole dog, but I saw it as such) licks it up. They pound a hammer on the table, and the dog head moves its ears, suggesting that the hearing is working. By now I was in awe. I didn't know this kind of thing was possible, back then, or even now. The thing that disturbed me most, though, was this. A lab technician patted the dog's head and scratched its ears. The dog's head visibly looked happy, opened its eyes wide and looked at the technician, and pathetically jerked towards the hand as if it appreciated the attention. The realization that the poor thing couldn't really move, just jerk what muscles were left there in a vain attempt to be a normal dog, was just ... depressing and spooky.
But they didn't stop there. The following experiment was reviving a whole dead dog, intact except for the opening in its neck where they hooked up the relevant tubes on the Autojector. Actually, they started with a live, anesthetised, unconscious dog, so that it would not feel pain. They drained almost all of the blood out of it, while an oscillating pen charted the dog's heart and breathing rate onto a roll of paper (like an electro cardio gram i guess, but old fashioned). Slowly, the rates decreased to nothing and the dog was pronounced dead. The lab techs waited exactly ten minutes, then hooked up the Autojector to the dog, filled the container on the device with the drained blood, and turned it on. Slowly the blood was pumped back into the dog, and its heart began to beat again. The Autojector also oxygenated the blood, and a few minutes after its heart started back up, it began to gasp for breath. A few minutes more, and its heart rate and breathing were totally normal. The film cuts to footage of the dog, a week and a half later, in a dog bed. It is still alive, but very weak and recovering. Then there is footage of the dog, its mother, and its brother (I think), from a couple of months later. They are fully recovered, jumping around and barking and playing like normal dogs. The film states that all three of them were revived after 10-17 mintues of death by blood loss on the table, thanks to the Autojector. The End.
This whole thing brought a LOT of thoughts and questions to my mind, so I am just going to ramble about them here. How well known is it that this sort of experimentation was going on in Russia in the 1930's and 40's? Was similar stuff being done at the same time or a bit later in the USA, or would restrictions due to the nature of the experimentation prevent it from being done here? America is kind of a @#%$ like that, so I don't know. I know that in the WWII death camps, the Nazi doctors did random wierd experiments with the prisoners and dead bodies. The Autojector research paved the way for artificial hearts and lungs, obviously. Were such experiments later carried out on dead humans, ever? I know they were on isolated human organs, but I don't know about severed human heads and complete dead humans, since it would be pretty hard to find someone who had just died of blood loss and get them into a lab for experimentation within 10 minutes, not to mention legal stuff about that. Even if people indicate their bodies are to be donated to science when they die, I'm not sure about the severed head business, and how long a person can be dead from blood loss before it's impossible to revive them with such devices, if possible at all. Yes, my knowledge of modern-day emergency resuscitation is kind of lacking. Today, can we make a severed human head function and respond to stimuli? How conscious would it be - could it think, and possibly speak, or would it just be like a dumb animal (re: Hannibal, the movie)? I wonder just how conscious the severed dog head was. It didn't whimper or bark, not sure if that's because the artificial respiration didn't provide for it, or it didn't have the energy, or what. I'm sure the head was pretty weak. How come it's so hard to keep people who are losing blood fast, alive? Or is it really not hard, just expensive? I keep going on aboud blood loss because that's what induced the cessation of the dog's heart and lungs, and its death. There wasn't any damage to the dog otherwise, whereas people who die and get all banged up while doing it (car accidents, for example) probably can't be revived. Can we do the same exact experiment as was done on the dog, to a human, and have it succeed? If we can, do we? When people who are losing blood fast but aren't dead yet, still breathing and heart beating weakly as blood is lost... let's say a gunshot wound... are rushed in an ambulance and get to the hospital in 10-30 minutes or however long it would take on a human that is obviously bigger than a dog. What about people who haven't lost a lot of blood per se, but their heart is not beaing and they are not breathing? That thing you see on Baywatch ("Clear!!" I don't know what it's called) as far as I know jump-starts the heart again and gets it beating, and eventually the person breathing, again, so maybe something like the Autojector isn't necessary in this day and age for that. Then there is the question of what is considered to be 'dead' anyway. Do we consider a human who has been revived the same way as the dog, a short time after cessation of the heart and lungs, really dead during that time, if we 'bring them back to life?' Legally people aren't pronounced dead until it's pretty clear that they can't be revived in whatever applicable way. But medically? Literally dead, then brought back to life? I imagine that for people, and not animals, in this hypothetical situation, calling them dead in the 10 minutes before they get to the emergency room isn't what you do these days. Have you medical, biology, zoology, and similar students (I know there are a few of you on my friends list) ever studied this stuff in college? Did you hear about this particular experimentation in Russia, or similar stuff? Do you know how far that technology went, and how far it could go as applied to humans? Or have better, different technologies overtaken this stuff as far as reviving near-dead or nonfunctioning human bodies?
Since the night I watched this video, it has just held my interest and thoughts for an insane period of time. I couldn't sleep last night thinking about writing down my thoughts about it in a livejournal entry. I really don't know why it is so fascinating to me. I'm not sure if I was just hopelessly out of the loop about medical technology to have been shocked by this film. Not so much the subject matter, but the time in which these experiments were successfully carried out. Over half a century ago. I mean, wow!
______________________________________________
Taken From HERE
