This one is gross. Sorry.
In a post on Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer delves into the U.S./Soviet space race to find a bizarre story about the adversaries’ attempts to raise the dead.
According to Swancer, the experiments started in the U.S. as early as the 1930s, with dogs as subjects. Dr. Robert Cornish of U.C. Berkeley (why does that not surprise me?) thought that a dead subject could be restored to life if the body was swung up and down rapidly to simulate blood circulation while at the same time being fed oxygen through a tube and injected with a cocktail of adrenaline, liver extract, gum arabic, blood, and anticoagulants. Seems legit. The experiments were predictably cruel and eventually ended by public outcry. A convicted child murderer offered his soon-to-be executed body to Cornish for experiments, but the transfer didn’t work out and Cornish went on to make toothpaste.
15-20 years later in the Soviet Union, Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko attempted to reanimate decapitated dog heads with a heart-lung machine. The dog allegedly remained awake and alive for some time, even eating treats, which dropped out the severed esophagus. While there are videos of the experiments, the general consensus is that they were faked. In the 1950s, Vladimir Demikhov believed that individual body parts, including heads, could be revived by attaching them to a living subject. Unbelievably, this ghoul’s research led to the first successful heart transplant in 1967.
There’s more, but I can’t continue. Yuck.
But…suppose any of this experimentation had borne fruit? What would have been the implications for the space race, World War II, or the Cold War? What happens next?
