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Soviet Scientists Made This Two-Headed Dog | Motherboard
- JanezStupar 13y agoThis is sick. The idea of two headed dog is not as sick in itself as is the clear misery these animals are experiencing.
- deusclovis 13y agoYes, it is absolutely horrendous. I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be aware of being a rider of a host body, separated from my body, unable to control my whereabouts.
- jlgreco 13y agoProbably not that different from being paralyzed. I doubt dogs in such a situation would get very far into the more philosophical and abstract objections a human in that situation would probably experience.
- deusclovis 13y agoYes, I agree. Probably not into the more philosophical objections and assessments. But there's probably a stark difference between being aware of riding a wheelchair and riding another human body...The latter being aware of what has been done to your body..
- lostlogin 13y agoI'm not in any way agreeing that what was done was ok, however I have observed that my dog didn't seem entirely self aware. He use to attack his legs, tail, farts etc. He would recoil in horror when he hurt himself.
- deusclovis 13y agoOh okay, not a big dog person here. haha. Interesting.
- schrijver 13y ago> But Demikhov’s work, while aesthetically disturbing and undoubtedly shocking (…) led to major gains in organ transplant research without compromising human health. His experiments, especially the organ transplants—he was the first to successfully complete both heart and lung transplants in animals — paved the way for the human version, leading to a procedure that has clearly saved countless lives over the ensuing decades.
- userulluipeste 13y agoIn Buddha's view life itself is a misery/suffering (his term was "Dukkha"). Yes, I can agree with you and support imposing limits upon our world and evolution, or I can recognize that we might be subjective in our assertions, much too subjective sometimes.
- cdi 13y agoCome on people. What about thousands and thousands of disease model lab rats, genetically engineered to suffer cancer and other horrible illnesses? Should we stop biological and drug research? Misery is electrons flying in the brain. Would you empathize with a computer program simulating pain model, when pain level is increased, or when computer is powered off? Animal is a mechanism. Canidae in nature have no problem with killing or inflicting suffering btw.
- StavrosK 13y agoHumans are animals too, and we empathize with them, so there has to be a line somewhere. You either don't empathize with anyone, or you empathize with everyone. We currently believe that it's worth sacrificing mice to make people's lives better, but we would do that, we're people. Hopefully, in the future, no living being will have to suffer for any reason. > Canidae in nature have no problem with killing or inflicting suffering btw. If you want to be held to the standards of dogs, nobody will stop you. I'd like to think I know better.
- astrobe_ 13y agoMorality applies between humans. Dogs, bears, sharks have no problem tearing you into pieces if their instincts tell them they have to. Other hunting animals have no problem eating their pray alive if they don't have to kill them first. Animals don't play by our rules. Empathy towards animals really is a side-effect of empathy mechanisms between humans, that we probably need in order to live in society. These side effects shouldn't influence too much your attitude toward animals.
- StavrosK 13y agoI disagree. I believe that beings that are capable of feeling pain shouldn't.
- cdi 13y ago>so there has to be a line somewhere. And that line is human consciousness. I empathize with humans and animals too(especially mammalian), of course. But I choose not to be swayed by feelings when I think about policy. Preservation of nature doesn't require empathy, and justice among humans doesn't require it after utilitarian principle is chosen. Domesticated animals are born and live for our utility. As long as we don't consider animal pet ownership as equal to slavery, I don't see how animal experimentation is problematic.
- rsynnott 13y agoAs far as medical research goes, it's fairly low on the horror scale.
- pavlov 13y agoI'm not sure I can agree with the article's claim that these experiments were necessary: "Without that terrifying two-headed dog, in other words, we’d all go down with our failing kidneys." Eventually we would have found other ways to collect the data needed for safe organ transplants than using live mammals. It probably would have delayed the introduction of transplant procedures on humans, so in that sense there would have been "people going down with failing kidneys" -- but how much suffering can you justify by saying that it might save human lives down the road? I'm reminded of Kazuo Ishiguro's excellent novel Never Let Me Go. (--- Major spoiler alert! ---) It takes place in a sort of parallel-universe Britain of the '70s and '80s where human cloning was invented just after WWII. Cloning has become the cure for cancer: just grow a steady supply of live clones, take their organs and transplant them to cancer-inflicted patients.... Of course it takes about 18 years to grow a clone, and you can't just keep these people in a vat somewhere. So the clones are people without citizen rights, whose sole mission in life is to be harvested eventually. Society sees this as justified because clones are not "real people" anyway -- and more importantly, nobody wants to turn the clock back to an era when people regularly died of cancer.
- jlebrech 13y agothat's the plot for 'the island'
- pavlov 13y agoI guess so. It's not an original sci-fi conceit as such. What I love about Ishiguro's book is how it's cast into a nostalgic past of about 1980, in an idyllic Summerhill-style boarding school, and the cloning alt-history scenario never takes precedence over the characters. The setup is just an ominous fateful presence that made me care very much for these young people who can never really even fathom avoiding their destiny, that it wouldn't be necessary for their days to be counted before they were even conceived.
- acqq 13y agoEventually we would have found other ways to collect the data needed for safe organ transplants than using live mammals. To start doing the transplants you have to actually do the transplants. Insisting on avoiding doing it on mammals, wanting to do on humans gives only one solution: would you really prefer to immediately experiment on humans instead of mammals?
- patothon 13y agoWell I guess you should take a look at this video then : http://vimeo.com/jamesfields/headtransplant http://vimeo.com/jamesfields/headtransplant
- kunil 13y ago"or body transplantation, depending on your perspective"
- VladRussian2 13y agothis ability of humans to perpetrate horrendous things under the guise and in the name of the greater good.
- victoriap 13y agoagree. but, the organic life is full of flesh and blood, where we eat and kill each other. wish we were light-creatures....
- Spoygg 13y agoThe conslusion of the article pictures the whole misery of false thinking. Two headed dog was not the reason for successful kidney transplant. Kidney transplant would be fine(r). Justifing this kind of lunacy is just lame. Humans want it all and want it now no matter the cost. Why do we have failing kidneys? I will not go into that direction, but just saying. Live healthy and you will not need the two headed dog to save you. Also why not just experiment on humans with their consent. "You have a failing kidney we have a new transplantation procedure that might fail but if it succeed you will be hero for future generations." - hard to imagine, it would take a bit longer to come to successful procedure.
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- rababababibo 13y agoThis story is one the internet like to rediscover again and again, usually it's not far from "Experiments in the Revival of Organisms" [1] by a certain Doctor Brukhonenko at around the same period of time, which lead the way to open heart surgery in Russia. [1]: http://archive.org/details/Experime1940 http://archive.org/details/Experime1940
- userulluipeste 13y agoI call this experiment an exploration. What we explored in the past or might come to explore in our future wasn't, isn't, and won't be always wonderful. Sometimes it is horrendous and scares our inner animal but, at the end of the day, I (for one) am glad to see this territory charted.
- batemanesque 13y agothis is great. wasn't really expecting his research to have contributed anything meaningful to science when i was halfway through the article
- vjvj 13y agoYou can compensate humans for what you do to them. We invented money for that. Furthermore, humans can make decisions to weigh up the costs, benefits and risks associated with any such offer. Animals can neither be compensated nor communicate their preferences for such decisions.
- nobodyshere 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 Please, tell us more about compensations and preferences.
- vjvj 13y agoYes of course humans can be forced just as animals are. However, under a functioning legal system, they can be experimented on if and only if they approve having viewed and understood the potential benefits and costs and the risks associated.
- alcari 13y agoThat presupposes they have sufficient sapience to make the decision.
- vjvj 13y agoYes it does. One would hope that in a properly governed country, information would be presented in a way such that the person making a decision understands that the costs and benefits are not guaranteed and that there is a risk associated - in the same way that companies have strict guidelines on how they report and investors are warned of the risks.
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoI say that the ethics should be left out of the science. If ethics conflict with research - priority should go to research, until alternative, more ethic approach is found. And the ones responsible for alternative should be the ones that claim the current method is unethical - do not let non-scientists to forbid a research just because they think it is unethical.
- arachnid92 13y agoWhat? Really? This argument is something I would expect someone like Josef Mengele to say, not a modern human being in the 21st century. You can't just leave ethics out of science. Doing so would pave the way for so many atrocities against both humans and animals "in the name of science" (and history is evidence of this).
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoIf the experiments on monkeys would lead to a medicine that would improve life of millions, would you still ban it "for the sake of humanity"? Ethics sure have its place, but it must not hinder the vital progress. Today you save monkey from being "treated unethically", tomorrow you die with the same monkey from unstudied disease.
- cabalamat 13y agoGood idea, let's start by experimenting on you.
- JabavuAdams 13y agoYou're designing a human system with no feedback loops or separation of powers. A minimal understanding of human nature, and a quick reading of history should convince you that this is incredibly stupid, to the point of being wilfully negligent.
- JanezStupar 13y agoYes, lets leave sociopaths to their own devices. As they are the only ones not constrained by ethics. I can imagine this would work really well. /sarcasm