Elephants on Acid (3 page)

Isolated-head research continued with Dr. Jean-Baptiste Vincent Laborde, a man whose brain weighed exactly 1,234 grams. We know this because Laborde was a member of the colorfully named Society of Mutual Autopsy. This society was a social club with one purpose—dissecting one another’s brains. Thankfully, the group waited until a member died of natural causes to perform the dissection. Laborde’s brain caused a bit of gossip because it turned out to be somewhat light. (The average brain weighs approximately three pounds, or 1,360 grams.) Had he just been posing as an intellectual heavyweight all those years? His friends, eager to preserve his reputation, insisted his brain must have shriveled because of old age.

In 1884, long before his gray matter was removed and weighed, Laborde became the first scientist to perfuse a severed human head with blood. The head belonged to a murderer named Campi (nineteenth-century newspapers tended to refer to all criminals by single names, like modern-day pop stars) and came courtesy of the French authorities. The results were disappointing—nothing much happened, a fact Laborde blamed on the hour-long delay between Campi’s execution and the delivery of his head to the lab. But according to rumor, Campi’s skin was later removed and used to blind the copies of his postmortem examination. So the experiment wasn’t a total loss.

Laborde subsequently conducted a more successful trial on the murderer Gagny, whose head he received only seven minutes after execution. By the eighteen-minute mark he connected Gagny’s carotid artery to the corresponding artery of a still-living dog, and blood was pumping through it. Laborde reported that the facial muscles contracted, as though the man were still alive, while the jaw snapped violently shut. But unfortunately (or fortunately for Gagny), no signs of consciousness appeared.

Around the same time, one of Laborde’s colleagues, Paul Loye, attempted to settle the debate about postguillotine consciousness by erecting a guillotine in the offices of the Sorbonne and using it to decapitate hundreds of dogs. He assembled a second-by-second chronology of the canine response to sudden head loss, a subject surely never again to be studied as thoroughly. He concluded that the guillotine caused almost instantaneous loss of consciousness, although signs of facial agitation, including dilation of the nostrils and opening and closing of the mouth in what resembled a yawn, persisted for up to two minutes.

After Laborde, a handful of doctors pursued similar research, but for a real breakthrough in severed-head studies the world had to wait until the late 1920s. That’s when Soviet physician Sergei Brukhonenko succeeded in keeping the isolated head of a dog alive for over three hours. What made this possible was the use of anticoagulant drugs and a primitive heart-lung machine developed by Brukhonenko. He called it an autojector.

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Brukhonenko displayed one of his living dog heads in 1928 before an international audience of scientists at the Third Congress of Physiologists of the USSR. As part of the demonstration, he showed that the severed head reacted to a variety of stimuli. It flinched at loud noises such as a hammer banging on the table beside it. The pupils contracted when light was shone in them. It licked citric acid off its lips. And it even swallowed a piece of cheese, which promptly popped out the esophageal tube on the other end.

Brukhonenko’s severed dog heads became the talk of Europe. The playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to the
Berliner Tageblatt
suggesting, apparently quite seriously, that Brukhonenko’s technique be used to extend the life of scientists suffering from terminal disease. He mused, “I am even tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature.” He also imagined doctors removing professors’ failing bodies and allowing their brains to live on as pure intellect. An entire university, he proposed, could be chaired by bodiless heads.

Shaw’s idea is an intriguing one. Faculty housing certainly wouldn’t be a problem at such an institution. And it would give new meaning to “going to the head of the class.” However, many people might understandably hesitate before volunteering to become a part of the student body.

Dr. Il’ya Ivanov was frustrated. He believed his research was of great, possibly world-shaking, significance. If successful it would make him one of the most famous men in the world. And yet here he was, thousands of miles from European civilization, reduced to sneaking around a West African research station like a criminal, hiding his intentions from the suspicious native staff. Only his son knew his true purpose. Together they planned to create a new kind of creature—a human-ape hybrid.

Early in the morning of February 28, 1927, the father-and-son team told the staff they would be inspecting two female chimps, Babette and Syvette, for medical treatment. They knew they didn’t have a lot of time. If the staff realized what they were actually doing, Ivanov wrote in his notebook, he and his son would face “very unpleasant consequences.” So, much to his displeasure, the insemination would have to be done fast. His son carried a gun in his pocket, in case the chimps fought back.

Ivanov and his son subdued the chimps and prepared to place human sperm inside the uteri of the animals. They used the tools of artificial insemination developed by the elder Ivanov in Russia, where his years of research had revolutionized the field of veterinary reproductive biology and had set the stage for the rise of large-scale stud farming there. However, the procedure went badly. Feeling rushed, Ivanov failed to fully insert the sperm. He knew there was little chance of success.

For many decades Ivanov’s gruesome hybridization experiments remained little known in the West. There were rumors, but few concrete details. Ivanov never published his findings. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of Russian archives that details finally emerged.

The militantly secular Soviet government sponsored Ivanov’s research, believing that a successful human-ape hybrid would have, if nothing else, enormous symbolic significance. This was less than two years after the Scopes Monkey Trial had demonstrated the hostility with which many Christian fundamentalists in the United States greeted any suggestion of an evolutionary relationship between man and apes. The pro-Darwin, Marxist leaders of the Soviet Union rubbed their hands together with glee at the thought of presenting the fundamentalists with a “human-zee.”

But Ivanov received aid from other sources as well. The French Institut Pasteur, fully aware of his plan, provided him with access to their West Guinea research facility, hopeful that his work would contribute to scientific understanding of the origins of man.

Later in 1927, Ivanov made one more attempt to impregnate a female chimp with human sperm, but this third try proved no more successful than the first two. He knew from his work with livestock that five or six inseminations per animal provided the optimal chance of success, but social conditions at the research facility didn’t allow him that luxury. None of the chimps ever showed signs of pregnancy.

Faced with failure, Ivanov turned to Plan B—impregnate human women with ape sperm. He made inquiries at a Congo hospital about the possibility of inseminating female patients. He suggested it would be prudent to do so without the women’s knowledge. His request was denied. Disheartened, and complaining about Africa’s “backward” culture, he returned to the Soviet Union, where he hoped to continue his experiments.

He brought back a male orangutan named Tarzan to serve as the sperm donor. He also revised his plan, deciding to seek out female volunteers. Remarkably, he got a few. One woman cheerily wrote to him that she was willing to surrender her body to science because “I don’t see any sense in my further existence.” Once again, though, fortune did not favor Ivanov. Tarzan died of a brain hemorrhage in 1929 before the experiment could start, leaving Ivanov apeless. The next year Ivanov was swept up in one of Stalin’s political purges and shipped off to a prison camp. He was released two years later, but died soon thereafter. This, as far as we know, brought an end to his research program.

Ivanov’s experiments mark a low point in the history of biological research. But they raise an interesting question. Could he have succeeded? Is a human-ape hybrid possible?

Humans are very closely related to other primate species, chimpanzees in particular. We share 99.4 percent of our DNA with them. The phrase “human-ape hybrid” is itself misleading, since humans are, in fact, a species of African ape. A May 2006 study published in
Nature
speculated that after humans split from chimps between five and seven million years ago, human evolution may have been influenced by continued interbreeding with chimpanzees. Many biologists see no reason why a human-chimp match would not still be possible, though the topic remains controversial.

And just in case you’re curious: No, Ivanov did not use his own sperm during the 1927 experiments. The identity of that
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proud father-to-be remains unknown. Ivanov only identified him as “a man whose age isn’t exactly known. At least, not older than thirty.”

“I will have the formula that will start the blood circulating again, and with it breath, and with it life!”

So spoke Dr. John Kendrick, a character in
Life Returns
, a 1930s B movie. Kendrick was fictional, but he was based on an actual person—Berkeley scientist Robert E. Cornish, a man who achieved notoriety by claiming he could defeat death.

Cornish’s career got off to a promising start. He was a child prodigy, graduating from the University of California with honors at the age of eighteen and receiving a doctorate by the time he was twenty-two. He then accepted a position at the University of California’s Institute of Experimental Biology, where he worked on projects such as lenses that made it possible to read a newspaper underwater. For some reason, they never caught on. But in 1932, while still only twenty-seven years old, he became obsessed by the idea that he could restore life to the dead.

At the heart of Cornish’s plan was a teeter board. This was essentially a seesaw. “By tying the ‘dead’ subject to a teeter board, and alternately tipping up and down,” Cornish wrote, “one expects a considerable artificial circulation of the blood.” His theory was that if you could get the blood flowing in recently deceased patients who had suffered no major organ damage, life would return.

During 1933 he attempted to revive victims of heart attack, drowning, and electrocution with the teeter board, but had no success. He did note, in a confidential report submitted to the University of California, that after the corpse of a heart-attack victim was “teetered” for over an hour, the “face seemed to warm up suddenly, sparkle returned to eyes, and pulsations were observed in soft tissue between windpipe.” But the guy remained dead.

Cornish decided to perfect his method on animals before trying it again on humans. In 1934 he went public with a series of canine resuscitation experiments. He operated on a total of four fox terriers, naming them, in an allusion to the biblical character brought back to life by Jesus, Lazarus II, III, IV, and V. The fate of Lazarus I was not recorded.

First he killed the terriers, asphyxiating them with a mixture of nitrogen and ether until their heartbeats and breathing stopped. Then he tried to revive them using a combination of teetering, mouth-to-snout resuscitation, and injections of adrenaline and heparin (an anticoagulant).

Amazingly, he had some success. The dogs returned to life. The catch was that it was a meager semblance of life. Lazarus II and III died (again) after a few hours, having never achieved consciousness. Lazarus IV and V were more of a success. They lived on for months, though blind and severely brain damaged. It was said they inspired terror in other dogs they met.

The press ate up the news of Cornish’s research, delivering blow-by-blow accounts of each experiment. “I could hear the breath coming back into that still body,” one reporter wrote of Lazarus II. “Slowly at first, then quickly as if the dog were running. The legs twitched. Later I heard a whine and a feeble bark.” It helped that with his brooding eyes, sallow skin, and dark hair, Cornish looked the part of a mad scientist.

Hollywood also loved Cornish. Universal produced
Life Returns
(quoted from above) in 1935. It would be a totally forgettable movie—imagine a bad combination of
Frankenstein
and
Our Gang
—except that it features five minutes of Cornish’s actual experiments spliced into the action. Cornish’s work also inspired a number of Boris Karloff movies, including
The Man with Nine Lives
and
The Man They Could Not Hang.

The University of California, however, was not so taken with Cornish’s new line of research. Faced with complaints from animal-rights activists, the school ordered him off its campus and severed all ties with him. He retreated to his Berkeley home.

Cornish lay low for the next thirteen years, fending off hostile neighbors who complained about sheep and dogs escaping from his lab and mystery fumes that made paint peel on surrounding buildings. But in 1947 he triumphantly returned to the headlines with news that he had perfected his technique and was ready for a bold new experiment. He would bring an executed prisoner back to life! He had moved on from teeter boards. Now he unveiled a Heath Robinson–style heart-lung machine made out of a vacuum cleaner blower, radiator tubing, an iron wheel, rollers, and a glass tube filled with sixty thousand shoelace eyes.

San Quentin death-row prisoner Thomas McMonigle volunteered to be Cornish’s guinea pig—despite assurances that, if the experiment was successful, he would still have to remain in prison—but the experiment was never given a chance. California state authorities flatly turned down Cornish’s request.