As with Monsieur Gagny’s head, too much time (twenty minutes) had elapsed between the beheading and the moment circulation was restored for the dog head and brain to regain much function. Guthrie recorded a series of primitive movements and basic reflexes, similar to what Laborde and Hayem had observed: pupil contractions, nostril twitchings, “boiling movements” of the tongue. Only one notation in Guthrie’s lab notes gives the impression that the upside-down dog head might have had an awareness of what had taken place: “5:31: Secretion of tears….” Both dogs were euthanized when complications set in, about seven hours after the operation.
The first dog heads to enjoy, if that word can be used, full cerebral function were those of transplantation whiz Vladimir Demikhov, in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Demikhov minimized the time that the severed donor head was without oxygen by using “blood-vessel sewing machines.” He transplanted twenty puppy heads—actually, head-shoulders-lungs-and-forelimbs units with an esophagus that emptied, untidily, onto the outside of the dog—onto fully grown dogs, to see what they’d do and how long they’d last (usually from two to six days, but in one case as long as twenty-nine days).
In his book Experimental Transplantation of Vital Organs, Demikhov includes photographs of, and lab notes from, Experiment No. 2, on February 24,1954: the transplantation of a one-month-old puppy’s head and forelimbs to the neck of what appears to be a Siberian husky. The notes portray a lively, puppylike, if not altogether joyous existence on the part of the head:
09:00. The donor’s head eagerly drank water or milk, and tugged as if trying to separate itself from the recipient’s body.
22:30. When the recipient was put to bed, the transplanted head bit the finger of a member of the staff until it bled.
February 26,18:00. The donor’s head bit the recipient behind the ear, so that the latter yelped and shook its head.
Demikhov’s transplant subjects were typically done in by immune reactions. Immunosuppressive drugs weren’t yet available, and the immune system of the intact dog would, understandably enough, treat the dog parts grafted to its neck as a hostile invader and proceed accordingly. And so Demikhov hit a wall. Having transplanted virtually every piece and combination of pieces of a dog into or onto another dog,[34] he closed up his lab and disappeared into obscurity.
If Demikhov had known more about immunology, his career might have gone quite differently. He might have realized that the brain enjoys what is known as “immunological privilege,” and can be kept alive on another body’s blood supply for weeks without rejection. Because it is protected by the blood brain barrier, it isn’t rejected the way other organs and tissues are. While the mucosal tissues of Guthrie’s and Demikhov’s transplanted dog heads began swelling and hemorrhaging within a day or two of the operation, the brains at autopsy appeared normal.
Here is where it begins to get strange.
In the mid-1960s, a neurosurgeon named Robert White began experimenting with “isolated brain preparations”: a living brain taken out of one animal, hooked up to another animal’s circulatory system, and kept alive. Unlike Demikhov’s and Guthrie’s whole head transplants, these brains, lacking faces and sensory organs, would live a life confined to memory and thought. Given that many of these dogs’ and monkeys’ brains were implanted inside the necks and abdomens of other animals, this could only have been a blessing. While the inside of someone else’s abdomen is of moderate interest in a sort of curiosity-seeking, Surgery Channel sort of way, it’s not the sort of place you want to settle down in to live out the remainder of your years.
White figured out that by cooling the brain during the procedure to slow the processes by which cellular damage occurs— a technique used today in organ recovery and transplant operations—it was possible to retain most of the organ’s normal functions. Which means that the personality—the psyche, the spirit, the soul—of those monkeys continued to exist, for days on end, without its body or any of its senses, inside another animal.
What must that have been like? What could possibly be the purpose, the justification? Had White been thinking of one day isolating a human brain like this? What kind of person comes up with a plan like this and carries it out?
To find out, I decided to go visit White in Cleveland, where he is spending his retirement. We planned to meet at the Metro Health Care Center, downstairs from the lab where he carried out his historic operations, which has been preserved as a kind of shrine-cum-media-photo-op. I was an hour early, and spent the time driving up and down Metro Health Care Drive, looking for a place to sit and have some coffee and review White’s papers. There was nothing. I ended up back at the hospital, on a patch of grass outside the parking garage. I had heard Cleveland had undergone some sort of renaissance, but apparently it underwent it in some other part of town. Let’s just say it wasn’t the sort of place I’d want to live out the remainder of my years, though it beats a monkey abdomen, and you can’t say that about some neighborhoods.
White escorts me through the hospital corridors and stairways, past the neurosurgery department, up the stairs, to his old lab. He is seventy-six now, thinner than he was at the time of the operations, but elsewise little changed by age. His answers have the rote, patient air you expect from a man who has been asked the same questions a hundred times.
“Here we are,” says White, NEUROLOGICAL RESEARCH LABORATORY, says a plaque beside the door, giving away nothing. To step inside is to step back into 1968, before labs went white and stainless.
The counters are of a dull black stone, stained with white rings, and the cabinets and drawers are wood. It has been a while since anyone dusted, and ivy has grown over the one window. The fluorescent lights have those old covers that look like ice tray dividers.
“This is where we shouted ‘Eureka!’ and danced around,” recalls White.
There isn’t much room for dancing. It’s a small, cluttered, low-ceilinged room, with a couple of stools for the scientists, and a downsized veterinary operating table for the rhesus monkeys.
And while White and his colleagues danced, what was going on inside the brain of that monkey? I ask him what he imagined it must have been like to find yourself, suddenly, reduced to your thoughts. I am, of course, not the first journalist to have asked this question. The legendary Oriana Fallaci[35] asked it of White’s neurophysiologist Leo Massopust, in a Look magazine interview in November 1967. “I suspect that without his senses he can think more quickly,” Dr. Massopust answered brightly. “What kind of thinking, I don’t know. I guess he’s primarily a memory, a repository for information stored when he had his flesh; he cannot develop further because he no longer has the nourishment of experience. Yet this, too, is a new experience.”
34
When he tired of moving organs and heads around, Demikhov moved on to entire dog halves. His book details an operation in which two dogs were split at the diaphragm, their upper and lower halves swapped, and their arteries grafted back together. He explained that this might be less time-consuming than transplanting two or three individual organs.
Given that the patients spinal nerves, once severed, could not be reconnected and the lower half of the body would be paralyzed, the procedure failed to generate much enthusiasm.
35
Legendary for skewering heads of state, from Kissinger to Arafat (“a man born to irritate”). Fallaci stuck it to White by making up a name for the anonymous lab monkey whose brain she had watched being isolated and for writing things like this: “While [the brain removal and hookup] happened, no one paid any attention to Libby’s body, which was lying lifeless. Professor White might have fed it, too, with blood, and made it survive without a head. But Professor White didn’t choose to, and so the body lay there, forgotten.”