These trials were to be the opening salvo in a new pogrom that Stalin was laying plans for. By then he had already launched the Doctors’ Plot, fantasizing that Jewish-cosmopolitan doctors were trying to murder the Soviet leadership. In order to halt the resulting pogrom, the Jews were, so the plan went, to be deported to Siberia—like the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tartars before them. Stalin’s death in 1953 terminated all this, and Stern was permitted to return to Moscow in 1954, “rehabilitated.” Incredibly, she resumed her career, and lived to see the year 1968.
Haldane would soon have discovered by word of mouth through communist and scientific circles that Stern’s institute had ceased to exist and that she had disappeared. W. W. Gordon, in Soviet Studies, fully covered the 1950 Pavlov conference in Moscow at which Lina Stern and other critics of Pavlov, such as Leon Orbeli, came in for strident, and telling, criticism.28 Gordon sent a copy of his report to Haldane, who calmly replied that “I think both Stern and Orbeli needed criticism. They have probably got too much and too late. I am sorry to hear Konorski, who seems excellent, got it in the neck.”29
8. EXPERIMENTS IN THE REVIVAL OF ORGANISMS
Creating propaganda for Stalin had a much broader scope than fraternal journalism. In July 1942, Ivor Montagu wrote to his X-Group recruit through the auspices of the Soviet War News Film Agency, a part of the press department of the Soviet Embassy that Montagu was now working for.1 Haldane was asked to appear in and supply commentary for some documentary films about Soviet science. Montagu actually listed three variant films to be cut from a larger project: a popular film, Soviet Science Snipits [sic]; a short film, featuring Lina Stern, containing material excised from the first; and one with more bracing material, called Experiments in Bringing the Dead to Life (“if we dare,” Montagu wrote). It is not clear what happened to the first two projects, but Haldane’s contribution to the third, eventually released as Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, remains extant today.2 It raises a number of questions about Haldane’s scientific probity.
The film concerned experiments purportedly made by the Soviet scientist Sergey Bryukhonenko (1890–1960), in which disembodied organs—severed heads of dogs on platters, human lungs—were kept alive and functional using a machine called the “autojektor,” which circulated and oxygenated blood. More ambitiously, deceased animals could, it was said, be brought back to life by the autojektor fifteen minutes after death, after having had all their blood drained and then reintroduced. The main footage, to which Haldane added English commentary and a short preface, had been produced for Russian consumption in 1940, based on a script written by Bryukhonenko himself.
Haldane, an enormous rumple-suited bald head with glasses, delivered his commentary in a plummy accent, awkwardly reading from a script.
I should like to tell you that I have seen some of the experiments shown in this film actually carried out at the All Russian Physiological Congress. As you can imagine, technique is everything. Besides such work as you are about to see, Bryukhonenko shares the credit for the methods of human blood transfusion, which were first developed in the Soviet Union, and are now practiced in this country, which have saved so many lives during the war.
The All Russian Physiological Congress had been held in Moscow in 1928 when Haldane had paid his first and only visit to the Soviet Union. Although he reported on multiple occasions about the science he had seen there, he seems to have made no mention of Bryukhonenko at that time.
Over some stock footage of women in a laboratory, Haldane went on. “What enables Soviet scientists to solve this problem? Long ago, science established a fact that animal organisms and tissues, isolated from the whole organism, can be maintained in a living state, but in order to achieve this, special artificial conditions must be created.” A dog’s heart is shown, attached to tubes, hanging on a stand. “Isolated organs can be brought to life even though they’ve been removed from the animal’s corpse some time after death. There’s a dog’s heart. It can function as well in artificial conditions as in a living organism, and for this purpose, blood is introduced into the cardiac vessels. The isolated heart beats just as it did a few hours previously in the living dog.” A dish holding expanding and contracting lungs appears, with the now-familiar tubes. “Bellows distend the lungs and fill them with air. The venous blood is forced into the lungs by the action of the pump. The dark venous blood passes through this tube [shown attached to lungs]. In the lungs, it takes up oxygen, and becomes arterial blood. The isolated lungs breathe, producing the same chemical changes as in the living animal.”
The film moves on from these isolated organs to severed heads of dogs, dinner-plattered but living on. “An animal’s head can also live in the isolated condition. Here is the plan of the experiment.” Helpful cartoons show the general organization of circulation from the autojektor. “The arterial pump takes arterial blood from the reservoir to the head, while the venous pump drains out the venous blood. The blood is arterialized in the reservoir, where there is a steady flow of oxygen. The artificial blood circulation ensures the metabolism necessary for the life of the head.”
The severed dog’s head then appears on a platter. “The isolated head lives on for hours, and reacts to external stimuli.” Then the eye is poked with a probe, and the dog blinks. The nose is tickled with a feather repeatedly and the dog’s head grimaces, opening and closing its mouth. It blinks again. Citric acid is applied to its mouth. It licks its lips several times, and moves its head noticeably. As it does so, its throat region expands as if it is breathing. “The isolated head even reacts to light”—a spotlight is shown and is played on the head—“and to sound”—a hammer is tapped on the table, the ears twitch, and the head moves distinctly away from the noise.
Then we shift from merely reviving individual body parts to reviving whole organisms, à la Lazarus. “The revival of individual organs enables scientists to proceed to experiment on reviving the whole organism. The revival of the whole organism can be achieved with the help of an apparatus called the autojektor.” The device looks exactly as one would expect an apparatus in the laboratory of a deranged scientist to look.
A cartoon shows the circulation of blood. “The autojektor carries out the functions of the heart and lungs. As we know, the heart, by its rhythmical contractions, supplies the body with arterial blood rich in oxygen. After losing its oxygen, the blood returns to the heart through the veins. From there, it flows into the lungs, whence with a fresh supply of oxygen it returns to the heart, and thence flows into the arteries of the organism.”
Haldane next describes the arterial pump. “The autojektor works on the same principle. The apparatus includes a system of pumps, for supplying blood and drawing it off. The arterial pump supplies the organism with arterial blood. When the blood has given up its oxygen, the venous pump draws it back into the reservoir. Here, just as in the lungs, it is enriched with oxygen, and returns into the organism. The blood passing into the arteries of the body ensures the necessary metabolism. In this way, the autojektor can perform the work of both the heart and lungs.” We are shown a bed with an autojektor next to it.
“We begin the experiment of revival. The experiment is carried out on a dog.” The unfortunate dog is shown, lying muzzled on a bed. “A substance which prevents clotting is introduced into the animal’s blood. The dog is under an anesthetic. It doesn’t feel pain. No interruption of the animal’s normal functions has yet occurred.” “The dog reacts to touch”—the eye is poked with a probe—“its pupils are normal. . . . A special apparatus, a kymograph, registers the breathing and the function of the dog’s heart. The pulse and breathing are normal.” A graph of instrument recordings continuously traced on paper is shown. “The experiment begins. All the blood is drained off through the carotid artery.” Blood is shown draining into a flask. “The heart has stopped. This is one of the animal’s last gasps. This is a final blip. The dog is dead.”
Now a stopwatch is started. “Without operative interference
, death would be final, as the disintegration of the body cells would gradually set in. The autojektor is being attached before starting the revival. The arterial pump is connected with the artery. The venous pump is connected with the vein. Ten minutes have elapsed since the animal died. The blood removed from the animal is pumped back into its vessels by the autojektor.
“The autojektor ensures a normal blood circulation in the organism, replacing the action of the dead heart and lungs. The artificial heart circulation gradually induces the heart to start beating again. The heart’s action begins to be normal. . . . The first sign”—the dog’s head and upper body moves. “The respiration is gradually restored. The dog breathes more normally and evenly. The animal’s condition approaches normal. We can now disconnect the autojektor, and leave the organism of the dog to maintain life with its own resources.”
Heartbeat sound effects ensue, and then portentous music. “The dog soon shakes off the effects of the anesthetic.” The dog is shown lying on a cot. “The dog is still weak and can’t move.” We switch to triumphant music.
A few days later. “After ten to twelve days, the dog returns to its normal state.” A nurse is shown walking a dog on a leash. “After the experiment, the dogs can live for years, they grow, they put on weight, and have families. For a number of years now, three dogs have been under observation in the Voronezh Medical Institute, after being revived by artificial blood circulation. This dog ‘Bunny’ [shown] was revived in 1939, after having been dead for eight minutes. ‘Black ears’ [shown] is the offspring of revived parents. She herself was revived in 1939, after eleven and a half minutes of death. ‘Naida’ [shown] was revived in 1938 after fifteen minutes of death.” (So the Lamarckian transmission to offspring of the effects of death and reanimation could be ruled out, although Haldane does not explicitly make this connection.)
“These experiments on the revival of dogs have shown that the process has no harmful effect on the animal organism. The question of the revival of animals is one of the most interesting problems in physiology today. Experiments on revival have added to the valuable store of our knowledge of experimental medicine.” The End.
The film was screened in London before the end of 19423 and then in New York the following year. Time magazine reported that a thousand scientists had attended the New York screening, and that the “scientific audience thought this work might move many supposed biological impossibilities into the realm of the possible.”4 The Time report had something of Haldane’s own style—that is, it read like a press release from the Soviet press agency. “Red science is a vast, centrally directed enterprise, with the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences at the top and hundreds of institutes working on assigned problems. No scientific frontier is neglected.” Great achievements were duly listed, including “a method of planting winter wheat (in unplowed stubble) that enables it to withstand Siberian temperatures of 40 below zero.” (In fact, this method was a failure and led to heavy crop losses, but it took the Soviets fifteen years to penetrate the misleading nonsense surrounding it.5) The imprimatur of J. B. S. Haldane, F.R.S., surely helped to persuade these audiences.
Bryukhonenko was born in Kozlov (present-day Michurinsk), near the city of Tambov, on April 30, 1890. After studying medicine at the University of Moscow and qualifying in 1914, he served as a doctor in the First World War. Apparently he invented the autojektor machine, for artificially circulating the blood via mechanical roller pumps, in 1926, after discovering that the drug suramin could be used as an anticoagulant. By 1928 he had applied for a Soviet patent for his “Device for Artificial Circulation.”6 The patent application contained helpful diagrams showing his experiments on dogs.7
This was really an early heart-lung machine. As Haldane indicated, Bryukhonenko demonstrated some of his experiments at the Third Congress of Physiologists of the U.S.S.R. on June 1, 1928—but made rather more modest claims, showing nothing more than some lingering reflex reactions.8 He showed no resuscitation experiments then. In 1960, Probert and Melrose, writing in The British Medical Journal, summarized his research as follows. “In his total perfusions Brukhonenko stopped inflating the lungs of the experimental animal and excluded its heart from the circulation by mechanical means. In three such experiments when he discontinued the perfusion and restarted pulmonary inflation he succeeded in restoring a temporarily effective heart-beat. He also observed that cooling of blood in the extracorporeal circuit reduced the temperature of the perfused animal, and to overcome this surrounded some of the tubing with warm water.”9
After this respectable start, Bryukhonenko fell victim to the relentless escalation of Soviet expectations, driven by their use of scientific claims as propaganda. In 1936 he was given his own Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy to work (strictly materialist) miracles within. Soon Nature was reporting that Bryukhonenko had progressed to “reanimatology,” more ambitious even than merely keeping severed heads functioning—insofar as repeating “facts” presented by the Soviet Union Year Book Press Service can be considered reporting.10 Corpses could now be raised from the dead after as long as half an hour of induced death, and restored to a fully functioning state—that is, not brain-dead. After the war, these sorts of claims faded from plain sight without ever totally vanishing from the Soviet journals, where “reanimatology” resurfaced from time to time to set ever-extending records for the times claimed between death and reinvigoration with total recovery.11
By 1995, as the country was being reintegrated into the international scientific establishment, one author was exasperated enough by this idiosyncratic survival to lay down the known facts explicitly.
Clinical experience confirms the fact that the time taken for clinical death to occur does not exceed 5–6 min in adults and 7–8 min in children. At low temperatures, these times may be extended a little. Information in the literature concerning the complete revival in ordinary temperature conditions, after 20–30 min. clinical death, cannot be considered proven. It only disorientates the doctors and does harm to the development of clinical resuscitation.12
Bryukhonenko had tapped into a popular theme in Soviet science-fiction writing in the 1920s. In 1925 Aleksandr Beliaev (1884–1942) had enthralled his audience with his novella The Head of Professor Dowell, which was serialized in The Worker’s Gazette.13 Set in the United States, the story had the unfortunate Professor Dowell suffer decapitation followed by disembodied reanimation in a laboratory, where the talking head eventually reveals whodunit, but only after many adventures. Inevitably, Bryukhonenko’s work became intermingled with this material through the ordinary mechanisms of journalism, and perhaps because, as Nikolai Krementsov has ventured, the Soviet scene then was “at one and the same time permeated by omnipresent death and by high hopes for the future.” By 1929 the theme had circulated broadly enough for George Bernard Shaw to try to get in on the ground floor, volunteering his own head for the new procedure. “I am greatly tempted to have my head cut off so that I may continue to dictate plays and books independently of any illness, without having to dress and undress or eat or do anything at all but to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature.”14 The disembodiment theme was a very old one, in both literary and scientific terms.15
Faking photographs was an active area of interest in the Soviet Union, starting with the Revolution—many of the iconic photographs from the period are doctored to grossly inflate crowds.16 This accelerated with the un-personing of Old Bolsheviks, who had to be retrospectively removed from the company of Stalin wherever they were unfortunate enough to have been photographed with or near him.17 Documentary film was a capital-intensive extension of this process, with the advantage of much greater verisimilitude. Moving pictures, giving the impression of motion, suggest truth in an immediate way that still photographs cannot. Improving the facts—using heads of concealed live dogs—is easier and more convincing than inventing everything wholesale. Ivor Montagu had himself learned from Eisenstein that the film is not in the footage but rath
er in the editing. Bryukhonenko’s research was ideal material for this. Those motivated enough would find a prior media trail, presentations at scientific congresses and other suggestions that the work was real, as long as they didn’t inquire too closely about the way it had crept from blood circulation to reanimated cadavers. Haldane proved he was willing to collude.
9. IT IS YOUR PARTY DUTY, COMRADE!
Haldane had known Barnet “Doggy Woggy” Woolf since his early days in Cambridge at the Dunn Biochemistry Laboratory. There was also the Communist Party, of which they were both members—Woolf openly, Haldane secretly until he came out in 1942. Woolf had left Cambridge by the mid-1930s for a brief spell as a lyricist in the Unity Theatre, but broke his femur and underwent multiple operations, which left him with a lifelong limp. By 1943, he was back in the academic world at the Department of Zoology at the University of Birmingham, under Lancelot Hogben, a zoologist with mathematical leanings. Hogben, a science popularizer in his own right, was on friendly terms with Haldane. Though a declared socialist and a fellow traveler, he was not a Communist Party member.
At Birmingham, Woolf had conducted statistical inquiries into the incidence of child mortality in the north of England, believing that it could be causally tied to socioeconomic conditions there. In late 1943, he had written up the first of two papers on the results of this research and submitted it through Hogben to Haldane for possible publication in the prestigious statistical journal Biometrika (founded by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, and then edited by Pearson’s son, Egon).1 Haldane was a member of the editorial board. Woolf’s paper also included some stringent criticism of previous statistical work. Hogben wondered if Biometrika would be more likely than other journals to have the necessary paper stock, then in short supply. He hoped that Haldane would not approach the paper “with the absent-mindedness of a professor whose mathematical right hand does not know what his political left hand is doing.” Woolf needed “all the backing and encouragement he can get from you and me.”
Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday Page 15