 Frankenstein, and his monster ever since publication has fascinated popular culture. In a book, there was originally a warning on the potential horrors of unchecked scientific discovery would actually go on to inspire real life studies. In a case of life imitating art in the modern day, we possess surgical abilities that would not be out of place in Mary Shelley's work. One of the ultimate goals is that of reviving the dead, a skill that would truly prove man to have the abilities of God. Needed to say, this has resulted in a number of experiments, and one such would become infamous and even managed to filter its way into pop culture in a number of ways. The experiments would be filmed, translated into English and distributed, and would become referenced in multiple books, including work from roll-doll, TV shows and even music. My name is John, and today we're looking at the 1940 revival of organisms film and its background. My ethical rating will be at the end, and welcome to the dark side of science. Our story starts long before the 1940s, and even the Soviet Union, with the birth of a future surgical pioneer. Sergei Sogayvich Bruck-Honenko was born on the 30th of April 1890, in Kozlov, modern-day Mocherinsk, to a family of a civil engineer. Bruck-Honenko showed promise from a young age, where, as seen in his photo, he designed and built his own bicycle in his teenage years. He would enroll at a college in Saratov for his pre-medical education, after which moving to the medical facility of the University of Moscow for his further education. Bruck-Honenko would graduate as a doctor in 1914. This should have been the start of a long hospital career, but world politics would intervene with the start of the First World War. Needless to say, there was a need for medical staff to deal with a never-ending pile of casualties. As such, he was brought into active duty with the army as a junior doctor. During his service, he would see horrific injuries that war can inflict. The experiences he gained in treating wounds would influence Bruck-Honenko to explore different concepts of keeping a patient alive, after injuries to major organs and arteries, with extra-corpal circulation. As a side note, that will make a lot of sense for the later experiments in Bruck-Honenko's career. Here comes my dictionary again. Extra-corpal circulation is circulation of the blood outside the body, as through a heart, lung machine or artificial kidney. His career in the army would end abruptly, when the Russian Empire pulled out of the First World War to deal with some internal issues and regicide. He would return to Moscow in autumn of 1917, working for the Sanitary Control Council of Soloniki. In 1919, he would change jobs, working at a military hospital in Lefotovo, just on the outskirts of Moscow, as the assistant professor in the clinical pathology department. Again, like during his war years, he would experience a wide array of injuries and illnesses. In 1923, Bruck-Honenko returned to his interest in extra-corpal circulation, when he was introduced to a drug, Suramen. He discovered it could be used as an anticoagulant. His experimentation at the time used roller pumps to perfect blood flow without the risk of contamination. Soon enough, his experimentation would result in him designing a new machine for extra-corpal circulation. Lung machines were a concept dating all the way back to Maximilian von Frey's early prototype in 1885, but a lack of anticoagulant drugs made the concept impossible to pull off. But as we saw with Bruck-Honenko, he had such a compatible drug. Three years after his awareness of Suramen, Bruck-Honenko had designed and built one of the first feasible heart and lung machines called the autojector. The name to me sounds pretty nightmarish, and to be honest how it works is pretty nightmarish too. Here's a summary of how the autojector keeps the subject alive. Right, well the first gruesome but interesting part of the machine is how it originally oxygenated blood. What is pretty efficient at doing this you might think? Well, it's the lungs. Bruck-Honenko thought, why try to better mother nature? And for his autojector, he made use of real donor lungs. Bruck-Honenko would employ excise lungs from a donor animal and use two mechanically operated diaphragm pumps with a system of valves. The first pump would deliver blood to the oxygenator, the donor lungs. The second pump would return the now oxygenated blood back into the patient's body. The experimental animal and donor animal were both injected with Suramen before the experiment to stop the blood from clotting. Now Bruck-Honenko had the machine and the method, he set about to test it out on November 1, 1926. The experiment was to use dogs. The experimental dog was hooked up to the machine via the cartioid artery and jugular vein. The autojector was switched on and adjusted to pump blood at the same flow rate as the dog's heart, working in parallel that Bruck-Honenko would name later on parallel circulation. A ligature was tied around the heart of the dog to stop it from beating, at which point the autojector was switched off to allow the animal to go into cardiac arrest. Once some time had passed, the autojector was switched back on and total profusion was achieved. The dog apparently lived for around 2 hours after its heart stopped, but the experiment was brought to an end when the mammary artery burst, subsequently killing the dog. But the concept was now proven. This experiment was the first of its type and marked a milestone for providing blood flow in a patient with an arrested heart. In total 8 experiments would be conducted by Bruck-Honenko with his machine in 1926. He would later say on this series of experiments, in principle the artificial circulation may be used for certain operations on the arrested heart, however further improvement of the technique is necessary for its practical implementation. And improve it he did, for the next few years Bruck-Honenko experimented with both isolated organs and total body perfusions, all using dogs. He felt so confident in his method that in 1928, on the 1st of June, he demonstrated the autojector to the international audience at the 3rd Congress of Physiologists of the USSR. A year later, Bruck-Honenko would shock and wow the world with his studies on the methods of artificial blood circulation and blood transfusion, where a severed dog head was kept alive, with it even reacting to its surroundings, opening its mouth and even swallowing a piece of cheese. In the late 1920s and early 1940s the autojector was used for hyperthermia based experiments, where dogs would be cooled down to the point of cardiac arrest at a temperature of around 3 degrees centigrade, then warmed back up with no long term damage to the subjects. The machine would be further improved upon by creating artificial lungs via a bubble oxygenator. In 1939, a series of experiments, 12 out of 13 test animals were resuscitated using the heart lung machine, after around 10 minutes of circulatory arrest. All of the dogs that were brought back to life recovered completely without any apparent neurological damage. So confident and successful was Bruck-Honenko in the autojector that he decided to show it off in the now infamous movie, Experiments in the Revival of Organisms. The short movie was intended to showcase the pinnacle of Soviet scientific experimentation into extracorporeal circulation. Now I must say it is worth watching the film in full, it's only 20 minutes or so and when I watched it I definitely had mixed feelings, not only because seeing various dogs being used as test subjects, but also, well, we'll discuss that in a bit. The movie successively ramps up the use of the autojector and exhibits various experiments, which had been undertaken during the late 1930s. Firstly, we're greeted with an isolated heart pumping with the help of an artificial lung. It circulated blood through various tubes and seems to be working rather well outside of its body. Next we are shown a lung oxygenating blood via rebelos. Then we are greeted with what seems to be a disembodied dog head connected up to the autojector. We're also shown via cartoon the connections between it and Bruck-Honenko's machine. This part and the next are considered to be the most controversial. It is shown being stimulated with its eyes being poked. Bruck acid is also placed around the dog's mouth and it can be seen licking its lips. Other stimuli are used, with a spotlight being shone on the dog's face and a hammer banging the table next to it, both of which produce what looks to be an unapproving face. As part of the grand finale, Bruck-Honenko in his film would revive the dead. A dog is shown on an operating table. It has been given serumine and an anesthetic. The blood is then drained from the dog causing cardiac arrest, after which the blood is put into a container and then fed into the autojector. Now that the dog is drained of blood and dead, 10 minutes is waited. During this time the machine is hooked up to the now deceased animal. At roughly 10 minutes after death, the autojector is powered up and the pumping of warm oxygenated blood begins. Lo and behold, the dog's heartbeat is shown starting up, then, not long after, it takes its first breath post-revival. The dog is seen post-experiment lying down looking very sorry for itself. Then around 10 to 14 days later, it is seen to be acting as if back to normal. The film ends with several dogs being shown to have also been killed to be brought back to life. One of whom was dead for a reported 15 minutes. Some even had gone on to have puppies. The film was filmed at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy in Moscow and was designed to try and appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, with its diagrammatic explanation of the experiments and of the autojector's operation. To add a level of believability to the production, British scientist JBS Howden introduced the English-language version of the film, claiming to have witnessed all of the experiments personally. The film was distributed across the US by the National Council of American Soviet Friendship, not surprisingly a communist-socialist sympathetic group. Now the movie shocked many that saw it and impressed others, working its way into American pop culture, but the film is most likely a propaganda piece with its experiments potentially staged. It is thought by many that it is likely that the final two most shocking experiments were faked for the film. When the beheaded dog is introduced to stimuli, the way it moves looks like it's still anchored to something, and even at one point looks to turn around. Something I think that might be impossible without a body. But a final revival scene, the heart of the then dead dog, is not shown any type of restarting by massaging or electro-shocking. Instead, just re-oxygenated blood is all that's needed. But although possible it was faked for the film, it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Maybe the filmmakers decided to omit the more intricate details of bringing back a dead dog. But a dog head experiment again, it although possibly was also faked, did actually happen as there are several accounts of earlier experiments being showcased, with even photographic evidence of a separated dog head attached to the auto-jector. For example, when Brook and Enko exhibited his head experiment in 1928 to western scientists and released its findings in experiments on isolation of dogs heads. My theory is maybe it was faked because the stimuli reactions weren't as impressive in the real experiments as that shown in the film. Some of the biggest red flags are that the experiment wasn't shown in full frame, and connecting the auto-jector wasn't shown. Reportedly, some of the witnesses claimed that when they had seen the dog head experiment previously it only lasted a couple of minutes and not the hour was claimed in the film. We also need to bear in mind the period in which the film was produced, in which propaganda was rife in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Possibly the film was presented for dramatic effect, and maybe the actual results weren't as striking, although still fascinating for the camera. It should also be stated that the apparent credible witness, J.B.S. Howden, was an ardent Stalin supporter and also a vocal communist. Scientists and co-worker of Brook and Enko, Nikolai Terabinsky, published a monograph and reported excellent results of more than 260 open heart operations on dogs in 1940, demonstrating the viability of the device on humans. After going as far as he could with the dogs, Brook and Enko and his colleague Terabinsky sought to test out the auto-jector on a human subject, but war again would scupper the scientists' plans. Operation Barbarossa was unleashed by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union, and by 1945 tens of millions would be dead and many parts of the country would be left in ruins. Between the end of the war and 1951, Brook and Enko was sent to work at the Skilyovsky Emergency Institute in Moscow. During this period he had little chance to develop the auto-jector, but in the early 1950s he returned to testing out his device. Between 1951 and 1958, Brook and Enko was the head of the Physiology Laboratory at the Institute of Experimental Surgical Devices and Instruments in Moscow. He put forward his device for the revival of patients of sudden death, but after a number of attempts the machine failed to resuscitate any subjects. Time was running out for a Soviet extracorpore circulation machine. Although Brook and Enko also suggested his machine would work for open heart surgery, the pioneering auto-jector would be eclipsed by John Haitian Gibbon. When, on the 6th of May 1953, he was able to perform the first successful human open heart procedure using his own machine. The final nails in the coffin of the Soviet auto-jector came when Nikolai Terabinsky died in 1959. By now, Brook and Enko was the head of the Laboratory of Artificial Circulation at the Institute of Experimental Biology and Medicine. But just a year after Nikolai, Brook and Enko himself would pass away on the 20th of April 1960. In 1965, Brook and Enko posthumously received the Lenin Prize, the highest scientific award in the Soviet Union. The auto-jector would die with both men and their leaps forward would largely be forgotten to time. But the film released in 1940 would serve as a record of the experiment falling into the public domain. The machine was a crude method of total perfusion and the series of experiments resulted in a countless number of dead dogs. The experiments are remarkably similar to the Vladimir Demikov double dog headed studies and the monkey head transplants I covered in the first episode of A Dark Side of Science. Although animal testing like this makes me a bit uncomfortable, the experiments were working towards an admirable goal, far less the mad scientist trope in which the film watched without context invokes. I'm going to rate this subject around a five or a six as killing dogs is bad but a scientific discovery was really impressive. Where would you rate the subject? One is ethical and nine is truly evil. Thank you for watching.