Soviet Scientists Made This Two-Headed Dog | Motherboard | Hacker News Reader

Soviet Scientists Made This Two-Headed Dog | Motherboard

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38 pointsdeusclovis52 comments

I'm not sure I can agree with the article's claim that these experiments were necessary:

"Without that terrifying two-headed dog, in other words, we’d all go down with our failing kidneys."

Eventually we would have found other ways to collect the data needed for safe organ transplants than using live mammals. It probably would have delayed the introduction of transplant procedures on humans, so in that sense there would have been "people going down with failing kidneys" -- but how much suffering can you justify by saying that it might save human lives down the road?

I'm reminded of Kazuo Ishiguro's excellent novel Never Let Me Go.

(--- Major spoiler alert! ---)

It takes place in a sort of parallel-universe Britain of the '70s and '80s where human cloning was invented just after WWII. Cloning has become the cure for cancer: just grow a steady supply of live clones, take their organs and transplant them to cancer-inflicted patients.... Of course it takes about 18 years to grow a clone, and you can't just keep these people in a vat somewhere. So the clones are people without citizen rights, whose sole mission in life is to be harvested eventually. Society sees this as justified because clones are not "real people" anyway -- and more importantly, nobody wants to turn the clock back to an era when people regularly died of cancer.

that's the plot for 'the island'

I guess so. It's not an original sci-fi conceit as such.

What I love about Ishiguro's book is how it's cast into a nostalgic past of about 1980, in an idyllic Summerhill-style boarding school, and the cloning alt-history scenario never takes precedence over the characters. The setup is just an ominous fateful presence that made me care very much for these young people who can never really even fathom avoiding their destiny, that it wouldn't be necessary for their days to be counted before they were even conceived.

Eventually we would have found other ways to collect the data needed for safe organ transplants than using live mammals.

To start doing the transplants you have to actually do the transplants. Insisting on avoiding doing it on mammals, wanting to do on humans gives only one solution: would you really prefer to immediately experiment on humans instead of mammals?

putting second heart into a dog may look like some transplant experimentation. Butchering and sewing 2 dogs together - nope, it is 1959, it is for the "wow" effect in the show of "the Soviet science under the wise leadership of the Communist Party is the most advanced science in the world". No wonder that they freely let the LIFE journalists in.

I suspect that you have no idea about surgery at all. Based on what do you claim that heart transplants are valid experiments and head transplants aren't? Only because of the shock effect?

Try reading about the history of medicine: after Galen (second century common era), mostly thanks to different church/ideological dogmas, "doctors" (quotes because they were quite unsurprisingly unaware of the scientific approach) spent hundreds of years theorizing instead experimenting. Experiments of head transplantations are absolutely valid experiments.

More recently and related, USSR had its own ideology-based suppression of valid scientific approach in biology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Even things that seem like senseless "wow effect" butchering advance the state of science, if by nothing else than by establishing were our limitations are and are not.

In this specific case, this work with dogs would later play a role in inspiring Dr. Robert White to attempt the same with monkeys. This larger body of work would then play a role in the development of new surgical techniques for humans, such as the use of therapeutic hypothermia that improves survival rates by dropping body temperatures (something 'played with' during head transplant experiments to keep the brains functional for a longer period of time.)

I'm pretty sure if they would have used lab rats nobody would complain about the "butchering" so much.

That cure for cancer won't work for so many reasons.

"how much suffering can you justify by saying that it might save human lives down the road?" - human suffering, or canine suffering? What is the 'exchange rate'? And fish suffering? A difficult problem. PS. It's certainly much easier to be the "eventually we would have found other ways"-humanitarian, being a healthy individual :)

The conslusion of the article pictures the whole misery of false thinking. Two headed dog was not the reason for successful kidney transplant. Kidney transplant would be fine(r). Justifing this kind of lunacy is just lame. Humans want it all and want it now no matter the cost. Why do we have failing kidneys? I will not go into that direction, but just saying. Live healthy and you will not need the two headed dog to save you. Also why not just experiment on humans with their consent. "You have a failing kidney we have a new transplantation procedure that might fail but if it succeed you will be hero for future generations." - hard to imagine, it would take a bit longer to come to successful procedure.

This is sick.

The idea of two headed dog is not as sick in itself as is the clear misery these animals are experiencing.

Yes, it is absolutely horrendous. I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be aware of being a rider of a host body, separated from my body, unable to control my whereabouts.

Probably not that different from being paralyzed. I doubt dogs in such a situation would get very far into the more philosophical and abstract objections a human in that situation would probably experience.

Yes, I agree. Probably not into the more philosophical objections and assessments. But there's probably a stark difference between being aware of riding a wheelchair and riding another human body...The latter being aware of what has been done to your body..

I'm not in any way agreeing that what was done was ok, however I have observed that my dog didn't seem entirely self aware. He use to attack his legs, tail, farts etc. He would recoil in horror when he hurt himself.

Oh okay, not a big dog person here. haha. Interesting.

> But Demikhov’s work, while aesthetically disturbing and undoubtedly shocking (…) led to major gains in organ transplant research without compromising human health. His experiments, especially the organ transplants—he was the first to successfully complete both heart and lung transplants in animals — paved the way for the human version, leading to a procedure that has clearly saved countless lives over the ensuing decades.

In Buddha's view life itself is a misery/suffering (his term was "Dukkha"). Yes, I can agree with you and support imposing limits upon our world and evolution, or I can recognize that we might be subjective in our assertions, much too subjective sometimes.

Come on people. What about thousands and thousands of disease model lab rats, genetically engineered to suffer cancer and other horrible illnesses? Should we stop biological and drug research? Misery is electrons flying in the brain.

Would you empathize with a computer program simulating pain model, when pain level is increased, or when computer is powered off? Animal is a mechanism.

Canidae in nature have no problem with killing or inflicting suffering btw.

Humans are animals too, and we empathize with them, so there has to be a line somewhere. You either don't empathize with anyone, or you empathize with everyone.

We currently believe that it's worth sacrificing mice to make people's lives better, but we would do that, we're people. Hopefully, in the future, no living being will have to suffer for any reason.

> Canidae in nature have no problem with killing or inflicting suffering btw.

If you want to be held to the standards of dogs, nobody will stop you. I'd like to think I know better.

Morality applies between humans. Dogs, bears, sharks have no problem tearing you into pieces if their instincts tell them they have to. Other hunting animals have no problem eating their pray alive if they don't have to kill them first. Animals don't play by our rules.

Empathy towards animals really is a side-effect of empathy mechanisms between humans, that we probably need in order to live in society. These side effects shouldn't influence too much your attitude toward animals.

I disagree. I believe that beings that are capable of feeling pain shouldn't.

>so there has to be a line somewhere.

And that line is human consciousness.

I empathize with humans and animals too(especially mammalian), of course. But I choose not to be swayed by feelings when I think about policy. Preservation of nature doesn't require empathy, and justice among humans doesn't require it after utilitarian principle is chosen.

Domesticated animals are born and live for our utility. As long as we don't consider animal pet ownership as equal to slavery, I don't see how animal experimentation is problematic.

Human consciousness is entirely arbitrary. There's no definition that will include all humans and only all humans.

"And you my friend, how do you know I am not a fish — you are not I?" ;) It's splitting hairs... Yes of course there is no absolutely precise definition of human consciousness, but it does not mean that the term becomes useless. I can't draw a precise line between a plain and a mountain (where does one start and the other end?), but it does not mean I can never tell about anything that it's not a mountain

The term doesn't become useless, but it becomes non-usable where laws and morality are concerned. Should we experiment on cognitively impaired people because they are less intelligent than a dog or a dolphin? How about month-old babies?

Intelligence and consciousness are not synonymous at all. As for the month-old babies (or a boxer knocked unconscious - not as cute, but still ;) ), I think consciousness in this context should be understood as something specific of our species as such, rather than of any individual in particular.

Or in another way. The fact that we do not differentiate (in terms of "life value") between mentally handicapped, or otherwise helpless humans and the rest, is a result of a separate ethical choice that regulates relations between us as human individuals. This choice does not logically require accepting the notion of any animal rights.

What is "human consciousness"?

These are the so-called "suitcase words". They're neat and compact, but once you open the suitcase, you realize you had no idea what was inside.

Apply as a volunteer for those experiments you are also just a mechanism, no?

Essentially everything is electrons flying in the brain. I see animal welfare as a relative value (it does not take precedence over human wellbeing in my opinion), but this particular argument is utterly unconvincing.

Your human-centric arguments are very weak, as I'll detail below.

The more practical danger is one of dehumanization. If there is a legal (not scientific) line that you can neatly draw between human (suffering counts) and non-human (suffering doesn't count), then there will always be pressure to classify undesirables as non-human. This is always there in the background, and if we enable it, humans get abused. So, there is some practical value in being over-protective of creatures even if we don't think they're fully people.

Yes, we as a society should figure out what level of suffering we're okay with inflicting to pursue certain goals. It's perfectly legitimate for people to hold the opinion that the right answer is "none".

> Misery is electrons flying in the brain.

This is irrelevant and dismissive. It does not distinguish between human and non-human misery, unless you believe in some magical human sauce.

> Animal is a mechanism.

This is not a convincing argument. In my life and studies, I've yet to see a convincing reason why humans are not also mechanisms (assuming a broad enough definition that includes mammals). In other words, humans and mammals are much closer on the mechanism-complexity-spectrum than say rats and mechanical watches.

I would not empathize with a single ant's suffering (if it even can), but I would empathize with a dog's suffering.

> Canidae in nature have no problem with killing or inflicting suffering btw.

True, but we hold ourselves to a more restrictive standard.

> Would you empathize with a computer program simulating pain model

Your use of the word "simulating" pre-supposes the conclusion. This is a more problematic case. Part of suffering, I think, is the inability to control the response. I.e. if all humans had the bio-machinery to turn off pain or worry, then it changes the equation. I assume that any computer program that's sufficiently complicated to convince us it's a general AI would also be able to rewrite itself to remove suffering (except by choice). That said, maybe its esoteric and abstract concerns relating to ensuring its survival could cause it suffering.

As far as medical research goes, it's fairly low on the horror scale.

This story is one the internet like to rediscover again and again, usually it's not far from "Experiments in the Revival of Organisms" [1] by a certain Doctor Brukhonenko at around the same period of time, which lead the way to open heart surgery in Russia.

[1]: http://archive.org/details/Experime1940

I say that the ethics should be left out of the science. If ethics conflict with research - priority should go to research, until alternative, more ethic approach is found. And the ones responsible for alternative should be the ones that claim the current method is unethical - do not let non-scientists to forbid a research just because they think it is unethical.

What? Really? This argument is something I would expect someone like Josef Mengele to say, not a modern human being in the 21st century.

You can't just leave ethics out of science. Doing so would pave the way for so many atrocities against both humans and animals "in the name of science" (and history is evidence of this).

If the experiments on monkeys would lead to a medicine that would improve life of millions, would you still ban it "for the sake of humanity"? Ethics sure have its place, but it must not hinder the vital progress. Today you save monkey from being "treated unethically", tomorrow you die with the same monkey from unstudied disease.

Good idea, let's start by experimenting on you.

You're designing a human system with no feedback loops or separation of powers.

A minimal understanding of human nature, and a quick reading of history should convince you that this is incredibly stupid, to the point of being wilfully negligent.

Yes, lets leave sociopaths to their own devices. As they are the only ones not constrained by ethics.

I can imagine this would work really well. /sarcasm

I call this experiment an exploration. What we explored in the past or might come to explore in our future wasn't, isn't, and won't be always wonderful. Sometimes it is horrendous and scares our inner animal but, at the end of the day, I (for one) am glad to see this territory charted.

Well I guess you should take a look at this video then : http://vimeo.com/jamesfields/headtransplant

"or body transplantation, depending on your perspective"

this ability of humans to perpetrate horrendous things under the guise and in the name of the greater good.

agree. but, the organic life is full of flesh and blood, where we eat and kill each other. wish we were light-creatures....

You can compensate humans for what you do to them. We invented money for that. Furthermore, humans can make decisions to weigh up the costs, benefits and risks associated with any such offer.

Animals can neither be compensated nor communicate their preferences for such decisions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 Please, tell us more about compensations and preferences.

Yes of course humans can be forced just as animals are. However, under a functioning legal system, they can be experimented on if and only if they approve having viewed and understood the potential benefits and costs and the risks associated.

That presupposes they have sufficient sapience to make the decision.

Yes it does. One would hope that in a properly governed country, information would be presented in a way such that the person making a decision understands that the costs and benefits are not guaranteed and that there is a risk associated - in the same way that companies have strict guidelines on how they report and investors are warned of the risks.

this is great. wasn't really expecting his research to have contributed anything meaningful to science when i was halfway through the article

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