Zimyatin

In the days before PETA our Soviet friends went all "mad scientist" and experimented with reviving organs, heads, and whole organisms. I found the documentary on the subject to be quite a hoot and I thought I'd share. Keep in mind this is 1940.




Who said Jesus is the only one who gets to raise from the dead?

Need realplayer.

winstonjen

There was also a story I read about a scientist who transplanted the head of a monkey onto the body of another monkey while both were sedated, but it didn't live for very long.

RED DAVE

There was also a story, featured in LIFE Magazine, where a Russian doctor grafted the severed body of a small dog onto the back of larger one, sharing in its blood circulation. Totally disgusting. The rationale was the search for an attempt to graft severed limbs from a corpse onto a live person.

RED DAVE

vixstile

That was cool.

Azathoth

"Squaawk!Polly shouldn't be!"-Polly the Octoparrot

echidna

A human ear was "grown" on the back of a mouse only last year ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1949073.stm

If animal right activists were outraged by this, just think of the furore if they saw the dead horses being flogged in PD.

Wyz_sub10

*Ba-dump-bump*

Topic...drifting...driiiiiiifting.....

villainess

I was just reading about the swapped dog and monkey heads today, in an interesting little book called _Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers_ by Mary Roach. (Yes, this is the sort of thing my friends get me for my birthday.) The reason that these dogs and monkeys ended up in a book about human cadavers is, you guessed it, because one Robert White, having had some success with monkeys (most of the failure is due to the usual sorts of things that plague transplants - rejection issues, excessive bleeding) is apparently determined to try it with a human once he finds a suitable brain dead body donor and a rich, aging quadriplegic who is willing to undertake considerable risk for the reward of another couple of decades.


I love science. This is better than glow in the dark bunny rabbits.

the.villainess

MortalWombat

That was actually back in 1997. What was done was a biodegradable scaffold seeded with human cartilage cells was made in the shape of a human ear, and was implanted under the skin of an immunodeficient mouse (so it wouldn't reject the human cartilage cells). The eventual intent is to be able to reconstruct ears and noses in people who get them mangled in accidents or by disease by using these types of biodegradable scaffolds along with the patient's own cartilage cells.

I remember getting a laugh at some of the news reports at the time claiming that "scientists had cloned a human ear on a mouse."