Crazy experiments in the USSR: real and fictional

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Some of the Soviet experiments are just insane, especially those between the two world wars. Some pushed science forward like the creation of two-headed dogs, others seemed to be useless from the very beginning. In any case, everyone could be a part of a comic book plot or a movie about mad scientists.

How children were made experimental dogs

Russian textbooks tell about the experiments of Academician Ivan Pavlov. And he studied the conditioned reflexes of dogs using the example of the work of their digestion, and even a monument was erected to these dogs - so great is the contribution of Pavlov's experiments with their participation to the development of science. But the experiments were not limited to animals - they were also put on street children, who were plentiful on the streets after the Civil War. You can read about these experiments in the books of the physiologist Nikolai Krasnogorsky.

For the experiment, the child was surgically removed the duct of the salivary gland outside - this operation was irreversible. Then they treated them to different goodies - depending on what they managed to get, noting how saliva drips at the sight of goodies or even mentioning them, before the child is shown food at all.

Oddly enough, street children not only did not begin to be afraid of doctors, but also dreamed of getting to the experiments. They told each other: "They give a cranberry there!" And the saliva, which then drips from the cheek all his life … Well, many had health problems and worse than this. As a result of the experiments, it was possible to find out that the secretion of saliva in a person is not a response to food in the mouth, it is exactly the same conditioned reflex. This means that a person is able to produce them. In general, Soviet street children have invested heavily in the study of the brain.

New man or new monkey?

Biologist Ilya Ivanov, who went down in history thanks to the development of advanced artificial insemination techniques that were used around the world after the USSR, was also engaged in less practical-looking research. However, there is a connection between them, that Ivanovo artificial insemination techniques are used to obtain animal hybrids. In the twenties, together with his son, he traveled to Guinea in Africa to cross a man and a monkey, and specifically a chimpanzee.

To begin with, for the experiment, he needed to get sexually mature female chimpanzees, for which Ivanov invented a sparing method of capturing these primates (the method that was used before only allowed to get adolescents - and they did not heal). He fertilized the resulting females with human sperm. He was also rumored to have tried to impregnate several local women with chimpanzee sperm, which led to conflict with local residents, authorities, and eventually his own superiors. Ivanov and his son hastened to leave Guinea, taking the captured monkeys with them. None of the females were pregnant, and some of them died. Ivanov placed the rest in a nursery at the zoo.

For the next stage of experiments, he urged the government to find conscious women who are ready to advance science forward: African women, they say, do not experience any scientific enthusiasm. The found volunteers were supposed to be fertilized with monkey sperm. But soon the biologist got under cleaning, the experiment was curtailed, and only the monkey nursery in Sukhumi remained.

There is a popular legend that in this way Ivanov raised a new Soviet man, stupid, obedient (the supporters of the legend know little about the habits of chimpanzees), executive and efficient. Ivanov himself wanted to bring out universal donors for humans: just at that time, operations on the addition of monkey testicles to men as a means of rejuvenation were popular, including in the USSR. But other organs could also be planted - if chimpanzees were more like a person.

Why do you need a two-headed dog

They also write about Vladimir Demikhov in textbooks, but not in school textbooks - after all, he stands at the origins of transplantation. Unlike the two previous experimenters - Pavlova and Ivanov - Demikhov came from the very bottom: he was the son of a Cossack widow who raised the farm and children alone. At the age of eighteen, Vladimir decided to go to Moscow and entered the capital at Moscow State University, as a physiologist. Already at twenty, he conducted his first unusual experiment: he made an artificial heart and put it on the dog instead of his own. The dog lived for two hours, which was more than good for the world's first artificial heart (but not for a dog, of course).

After the war, which Demikhov, of course, went through as a doctor inside and out, he returned to experiments and transplanted a dog's heart … No, not to a person, but to another dog, this time without removing the first one. Soon he was able to completely change the heart and lungs, and then the liver. Each new operation was a real sensation and brought the heyday of transplantation closer.

But among the general public, Demikhov's two-headed dog caused much more excitement. Strictly speaking, together with the head of a puppy, the scientist planted the shoulders and paws of an adult dog. Both heads lapped with pleasure the milk from the bowls; the puppy constantly tried to bite the ears of an adult dog. The experiment was carried out in spite of the direct prohibition of the Ministry of Health and therefore in absolutely non-hospital conditions.

In fact, there were twenty such dogs. After the operation, all of them lived in the Demikhov family, but not for long. He was unable to completely solve the problem of tissue rejection, so the longest lifespan for the connected dogs was only a month. At the same time, their circulatory and respiratory systems were so united that all the blood and, along with it, nutrients and oxygen, the planted dog received from the carrier dog. The purpose of the experiment was not at all to breed two-headed animals, but to develop the possibility of temporarily connecting the circulatory system of one person, a sick person, to the system of a healthy and strong, whose heart could work for two.

Experiments that never happened

Along with information about these bizarre experiments, the internet is full of sheer fictions that don't stand up to scrutiny. Here is some of them.

"Soviet scientists tried to create a cyborg dog" … The attached images show that they tried to connect the dog's head with a humanoid body, which in itself is surprising: wouldn't it be more logical to start with a dog-like one? But, if you delve into this story, it turns out that this is just a fantasy on the theme of the real experiments of the physiologist Sergei Bryukhonenko. He separated the dog's heads and connected them to an artificial circulatory system, including an artificial lung, which saturates the blood with oxygen.

After that, the head clearly retained its mental functions: it was frightened and "barked" (no sound could be heard) when an oxygen probe was inserted into its nose, ate the proposed delicacy, blinked at the light and was alerted to loud sounds. Nevertheless, no artificial mechanical body was created for her - the purpose of the experiment was precisely to create an artificial blood circulation to maintain the life of the brain.

"Soviet scientists drilled such a deep well that the sounds of hell began to be heard from there and they abandoned it." … The legend is based on a geological experiment, during which more than twelve kilometers of land was drilled on the Kola Peninsula. Usually the legend is accompanied by a photograph of a huge hole, like a hole in the ground, but in fact the diameter of the hole on the surface of the earth is less than a meter.

The goals of the project were many, and almost all related to global issues of geology. And one was very practical - to develop an ultra-deep drilling technology. They drilled from 1970 to 1991, so it's easy to imagine why the project was canceled. The voices may have something to do with it - but only living ones, connected with Russian politics, and not from underground (which would not have been heard due to the constant work of the drill). But it is really hot at the bottom of the well - the deeper, the higher the temperature, and at a depth of twelve kilometers it reaches 220 degrees Celsius due to the proximity of the hot mantle.

"Experiment with Sleep and Exciting Gas" … This legend is so popular that a film was made based on it. Allegedly, in the forties, five Soviet scientists agreed to participate in an experiment under the supervision of the KGB, during which they would not sleep for a month, maintaining their vigor with an exciting gas. As a result, they not only lost their minds, but also began to inflict terrible injuries on themselves. They, of course, underwent urgent surgery, but in the end all the volunteers died.

History betrays itself by the presence of the KGB, created a little later than the specified time of the experiment. And also - until 2009, when she appears on the site of horror stories, it is impossible to find a single mention of her, even in the avalanche of publications about the declassified experiments and projects of the USSR, which swept the Russian press in the nineties. But before the full-length film, according to legend, a short film was already shot, replacing the volunteer scientists with captured Nazis.

Projects in the USSR at one time seriously influenced progress around the world. Soviet projects and experiments, which were eventually implemented in capitalist countries.