In 1954 Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov shocked the world by unveiling a surgically created monstrosity – a two-headed dog. He created the creature in a lab at the Moscow Institute of Surgery by grafting the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of a mature German shepherd.


Demikhov invited reporters from around the world to witness his creation. Journalists gasped as the two heads simultaneously lapped at bowls of milk, and then cringed as the milk from the puppy’s head dribbled out the disconnected stump of its oesophageal tube. Of course, the puppy did not need to eat or drink; it received all its nourishment from the circulatory system of the older dog. But it liked to drink because its mouth became dry. It also enjoyed licking candy.


Of particular interest was the extent to which the two heads shared a common set of sensory experiences. Reporters observed that when one head wanted to eat, so did the other. When it was hot, both panted. If one yawned, so did the other. Not all their emotions were identical, though. The older dog, annoyed at having the foreign head attached to his neck, occasionally tried to shake it off. This prompted the puppy to retaliate by biting his larger companion on the ear.


Demikhov’s two-headed dog lived for only six days, but over the course of the next 15 years he constructed 19 more. None of these lived very long either – the record was a month – as they inevitably succumbed to tissue rejection. Demikhov seemed strangely naive about this, and frequently commented that the dogs died only because of imperfections in his surgical technique, which would soon be overcome. This attitude puzzled his western counterparts.


The Soviet Union proudly paraded the dogs as proof of the nation’s medical pre-eminence, but most doctors in the west, while conceding Demikhov’s skill as a surgeon, dismissed them as a publicity stunt. The western press eventually began referring to them as Russia’s “surgical Sputnik”. Demikhov justified his activities as part of a continuing series of experiments in surgical techniques, directed ultimately at learning how to perform a human heart transplant. Christiaan Barnard of the University of Cape Town in South Africa beat him to this goal in December 1967, but Demikhov is widely credited with paving the way.

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