The best thing about secret government research projects is the fun, random codenames. For example – Project Bluebird… Weaponized birds activated by pitching peanut butter-and-seed-coated pinecones into an enemy camp? Not even a little bit. This 1950s CIA program was created to research alternative (generally psychopharmacological) prisoner interrogation techniques, and to create a new breed of puppet spook, whose free will, up to and including his self preservation instinct, was completely suppressed. Most of the experiment was spent administering low dosages of synthetic drugs and chemicals, including heroin, PCP, mescaline, LSD and ether, to unknowing military personnel stationed at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. While the CIA was tangentially interested in the direct effects of the psychotropics and narcotics, their real mission was to study the exploitability of withdrawal-addled soldiers – a goal they accomplished by suddenly ceasing test patients’ regular mickey slips. Of the 7,000 unwitting Project Bluebird participants, 1,000 demonstrated symptoms of epilepsy and clinical mopiness, including suicide attempts and the writing of songs with the word “Blues” in the titles.

(Project Bluebird was later renamed Project Artichoke, a surprisingly apt name that recalls bitter thistles cooked in acrid vinegar water and served up on admittedly delicious pizza, but Satan is the delivery guy and he thinks it’s funny to “forget” to seal the insulated transport bag.)

In 1953, after CIA director Allen Dulles allegedly started bitching and moaning about how many more brain-diddling experiments the government could conduct if they had additional human test subjects, the CIA consolidated all of its varied interrogation research under a singular covert umbrella – the now-infamous MKULTRA. While most folks associate these experiments with LSD research, the MKULTRA project had so many facets and subprograms that its claims of heightened efficiency are dubious. Project QKHILLTOP studied Chinese brainwashing techniques. Subproject 68, operated out of Canada, attempted to chemically erase subjects’ minds (via drug-induced comas) so that scientists could then rewrite the subjects’ personalities based on government specifications. The best, though, both methodologically and fun-codename-wise, was Operation Midnight Climax (yes, that is just what you were looking for, name-seeking high school-aged rock band), in which CIA-compensated hookers lured clients to government safehouses, where the johns underwent LSD dosings and sexual blackmail all in the name of interrogation research.

MKULTRA was shut down in the early 70s, though many believe that contemporary psychological interrogation techniques, such as those employed in Guantanamo Bay, are direct descendents of the CIA’s zany research.

While MKULTRA was chugging along, the U.S. Army, plied as it was on CIA-administered hallucinogens, conducted a wide array of chemical experiments, which didn’t have fun codenames, so whatever. I’ll just rattle them off real quick like. They tested chemical weapon dispersion patterns by blitzing six cities with toxic chemical sprays (I would have called it Project Bandersnatch). They (in cooperation with Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson and Dr. Albert Kligman) injected 70 Holmesburg State Prison inmates with herbicides (I would’ve called this one Project Potpourri Elitism). Additionally, they subjected other Holmesburg prisoners to toxic skin-blistering acids, so that scientists could observe the healing process (me thinks Project Sapphire Dingle).

The important things to get out of all this are a) you’re probably drinking government chemicals right now, but don’t worry… any damage that was going to happen already happened way back in your mom’s uterus when you were sucking whooping cough and DDT through your umbilical cord. It’s probably why coffee smell makes your eyes bleed; b) lots of the experiments detailed in this week’s posts had irrefutably positive results and saved dying babies and whatever so chill out. Christ; c) fun codenames. I’m serious about this. Even it just means re-titling the index cards in your recipe binder or sitting down with your significant other and assigning black ops aliases to your favorite sex positions, you need to apply this to your life.

Historical journeys can be a slog. What can I say? It’s all those damn facts. Even human medical experimentation in America can read a little bit yawny when it’s dragged out in paragraph form. Fortunately, I have no integrity and am, therefore, not above the use of cheap structural gimmicks. It’s like in that song from Mary Poppins about the sugar and the medicine, except the sugar is the structural gimmick and the medicine is the cough syrup that I’m drinking right now. Chim-chim-cheroo.

Time Period: 1940s

Problem: All the darn malaria that’s plaguing U.S. Naval troops in the Pacific theater.

Solution: Bring a bunch of malarial mosquitoes and experimental malaria vaccines to Statesville Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, infect a whole mess of volunteers and then test the vaccines on them.

Negative results: One of the 441 volunteers died from a heart attack (the scientists pinky swore that it totally had, like, nothing to do with malaria); during the Nuremberg trial, sucky Nazis attempted to use the Statesville experiment to defend their malarial infection experiments on… you know… not volunteers… at Dachau.

Positive results: Hearty support from the American public enabled the testing to continue for 29 years. The experiments were instrumental in pioneering modern malaria treatments.

Time Period: 1952

Problem: “Hey, does anyone understand cancer? I just… I don’t get it.” – Chester M. Southam, Sloan-Kettering Institute

Solution: “Okay, okay… I’m gonna go down to Ohio State Prison with a bunch of needles filled with live cancer cells, inject the cells into hundreds of unknowing inmates and then… see what happens, I guess?”

Results: “Nope. I still don’t get it…”

Time Period: 1955

Problem: Is America prepared to deal with biological warfare? The CIA does that hand-tilting “sorta” gesture that people do when they mean “no.”

Solution: U.S. boats off the coast of Tampa Bay, Florida, fire a chunky dose of whooping cough toward the city.

Negative results: Tampa suffers a massive whooping cough epidemic that infects 1,080 citizens, resulting in 12 deaths.

Positive results: The government’s worst fear – a “baker’s dozen” casualty scenario – proves unfounded

Time period: 1956-1957

Problem: Could terrorists attack the country using a swarm of mosquitoes infected with either yellow or Dengue fever?

Solution: Release millions of uninfected mosquitoes in Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida, and monitor the insects’ impact and range.

Negative results: Once released, the “uninfected” mosquitoes naturally contracted all sorts of contagious horribleness, leading to outbreaks of typhoid, encephalitis and other miscellaneous fevers. As the diseases spread, Army workers disguised as public health officials tested and photographed suffering citizens. Scientists later admitted that the experiment was a “terrible idea.”

Positive results: Some of the Army guys were allowed to keep their victim cameras.

Time period: 1962

Problem: “Hey, does anyone understand cancer yet? Man, this is frustrating!” – Chester M. Southam, Sloan-Kettering Institute

Solution: “Okay, okay… I’m gonna go down to Brooklyn’s Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital with a bunch of needles filled with live cancer cells, inject the cells into 22 unknowing patients and then… see what happens, I guess?”

Positive result: Southam’s medical license was suspended for a year after the hospital tried to cover up the doctor’s experiment.

Negative result: Two years later, Southam was elected head of the National Cancer Society.

Friday: Matt retreats back to conventional prose when confronted with government-run chemical experiments and psychological torture

The always provocative h+ magazine surveyed the experts at the Artificial General Intelligence Conference to get a grasp of when they though machines would get really smart.

The results are very interesting:

While the median guess is the 2020’s, some are saying we won’t see any robo super geniuses for a century or more. While we can appreciate their optimism in the delay of our demise, it feels a little bit like surveys of physicists in the 1920’s about the use of atomic energy as a weapon. That was considered a far off thing too…

How Long Till Human-Level AI?

Prolific Weird Things scribe Matt just posted his criticism of Avatar’s bioelectric network premise. Basically he feels that director James Cameron is trying to make it a parable of earth and our resource use – and that it’s an unfair comparison because Pandora has all sorts of nifty features like consciousness uploading that we don’t. I disagree.

The bioelectric network Matt takes exception to was just one example that Cameron was using to make a much more important point.

While on the surface Avatar seems to be have a hippy “save the rain forest” tone, it’s a lot deeper than that and has a scientific and ecological world view even a libertarian could agree with.

Resource use is a complicated issue. Cameron was trying to point out that we often don’t see the real value of the things in front of us. And he wasn’t suggesting the value of Pandora was the Na’vi’s religious beliefs – they didn’t seem to have any. A point the movie touched on a little and the accompanying Avatar field guide went into in great detail was all of the scientific knowledge of Pandora. Disease and starvation were problems facing Earth of 2154 and Pandora had solutions for that, but the government enforced monopoly of RDA (the company that runs things on Pandora) had no interest in shaking up the status quo. When the government won’t allow any competition, why change things? They had no interest in curing the problems of Earth using newly discovered Pandora science because as long as Earth was in a crisis the government backed their monopoly.

On present day Earth the difference between poor countries and rich countries has very little to do with natural resources. The countries with the highest GDPs are the ones that export information technologies and have a scientifically literate population. If your wealth comes from just pulling things out of the ground, you’ll eventually run into trouble when you don’t have anything more to pull out of the ground. Making matters worse, because your entire industry is tied up in what’s basically unskilled labor, you never develop schools and training that put you on a forward path.

Pandora, like Earth, is filled with incredible scientific knowledge with practical applications on Earth. The message of the movie was that the RDA was ignoring that because the could only see the value of one resource. Like an American car company or 90’s OS maker, they had no vision of the future other than their own.

The greatest wealth of the 21st century is probably going to come from biotech. Fuel, food, medicine and materials are going to come from us exploiting genes of various life forms on our planet. Scientist-entrepreneurs like Craig Venter are collecting vast databases of all the genetic information on our planet so they can engineer microbes that can turn CO2 into fuel or create new medicines. This is made possible by studying how life on Earth functions and then using what we’ve learned to create new technologies.

The moral of Avatar is that the greatest resource is knowledge – scientific knowledge. If the RDA saw the wealth that was around them besides the mineral they were after they would be even richer and life on Earth would be much better. The best capitalists are the ones that look to the future. Cameron, a physics major, explorer and multi-millionaire knows this and his movie reflects this value.

Immortality, plentiful resources and endless energy could happen in the 21st century – as long as we see the world around us and learn how to use its resources wisely.

According to some scientists at the Daily Mail, the answer is yes. A long term global warming trend due to CO2 emissions doesn’t preclude the possibility of nature deciding to flip the bit at least for a few decades and make things cooler.

Even though United States and other parts of the world are experiencing record cold temperatures, climate scientists are quick to point out (and rightly so), that doesn’t change the fact that CO2 absorbs infrared energy that would normally bounce back into space and that we’re producing a lot more CO2 than ever. The big question is how much does this CO2 contribute to global temperatures and how much warming is due to other natural factors?

The debate gets sticky when people claim it’s either one or the other. Professor Mojib Latif, a UN scientists and leading member of the IPCC is a global warming scientist who fully accepts that CO2 is a contributing factor to climate change – but questions how much. Global warming proponents are critical of him for suggesting that not all temperature increase is due to man made CO2. Global warming deniers (not the same as skeptics) are upset that he still believes CO2 is a contributing factor.

His data is based upon the role the oceans play in contributing to global temperatures. He attributes the latest cooling trend to ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs). He called the current cooling temps back in 2008. His research goes on to indicate that we could be in for a several decade long mini ice age before things get warmer again thanks to nature and man-made CO2.

If this is the case, then there’s an argument to be made that we should be thankful of all the CO2 we put in the atmosphere, because the winters are going to be milder than they would have had we miraculously stopped producing CO2 in the 1990’s.

The more we study climate, the weirder it gets. A recent study mentioned here at Weird Things a few weeks ago pointed out that core sample data indicates that historical temperature changes can come a lot faster than previously thought. Frequent mini ice ages may be the norm. You can read the Live Science article here: Big Freeze: Earth Could Plunge into Sudden Ice Age

The Daily Mail: The Mini Ice Age Starts Here

Sphere.com reports that the Pentagon has launched a program called Transformer X with the intent of developing flying cars for the battlefield. Awesome.

The objective of the Transformer (TX) program is to demonstrate a one- to four-person transportation vehicle that can drive and fly, thus enabling the warfighter to avoid water, difficult terrain, and road obstructions as well as IED and ambush threats

Everyone is well aware of the promise of flying cars and the fact that they still aren’t here. While investment schemes like the Moller Flying Car seemed only able to produce tantalizing proof of concept videos, there’s reason to hope that we may actually see real honest to goodness flying cars after all. Carbon composites have made it possible to make extremely lightweight airframes. New engine technologies have made engines far more powerful and lightweight. And computing has advanced far enough to solve the balance problem faced by very early designs.

So lets hope that billions of our tax dollars get this one right and maybe Elon Musk can bring it to market for the rest of us.

link: Pentagon’s Transformer Programs Aims to Build Flying Car – Sphere News

A tangent becomes a tangent when the hosts try to stretch their feeble minds around the global warming, the energy crisis and the singularity (again) after discussing clone sex.

Link: Craig Venter at TED on creating synthetic life
Link: Venter and Exxon enter partnership for biofuels
Link: Synthetic Genomics web site

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Natalie Angier at the New York Times has an interesting article that suggest if your goal in life is to avoid eating other sensitive, feeling communal creatures, going vegan isn’t enough. According to plant biologists, our leafy friends experience a world of sensation and try to avoid pain – a hallmark for many of what you should and shouldn’t eat:

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help.

This is why we should eat as many cows as possible. A cow eats millions of blades of grass, each one a soulful howling poet, and this genocide must be stopped, one juicy delicious steak at a time…

link: Basics – Another Challenge for Ethical Eating – Plants Want to Live, Too – NYTimes.com

In the latest Scientific American theoretical physicists Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez speculate that there might be a greater chance of life developing in other universes with different physical laws and that our own may not be as finely tuned as once thought.

Our recent studies, however, suggest that some of these other universes—assuming they exist—may not be so inhospitable after all. Remarkably, we have found examples of alternative values of the fundamental constants, and thus of alternative sets of physical laws, that might still lead to very interesting worlds and perhaps to life. The basic idea is to change one aspect of the laws of nature and then make compensatory changes to other aspects.

For example, if life really is possible in a weakless universe, then why does our own universe have a weak force at all? In fact, particle physicists consider the weak force in our universe to be, in a sense, not weak enough. Its observed value seems unnaturally strong within the Standard Model. (The leading explanation for this mystery requires the existence of new particles and forces that physicists hope to discover at the newly opened Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva.)

This week, Weird Thing Culture Reporter Matt Finley takes a look at the Homunculus, a strange idea that survived against reason and logic. Monday we looked at how long the idea has been around. Wednesday we found out how science got past the idea of little naked men ruling our lives.

The homunculi set a daring course – out of the genitals and into the brain. But before turning things over to all the scholarly yak yak of those incorrigible philosophers, I want to make a brief pit stop over in science. Remember that awesome part in “Blade Runner,” when Roy Batty is shaking down the replicant eye maker and says, “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.”? Well, before humans had any real understanding of how vision functioned, some people believed that there was a little brain-dwelling homunculus whose job it was to see what we see through our eyes, and then relate the information to our brains, so that the images weren’t lost, like, in the words of Batty, “tears in the rain.” (Seriously, though, how awesome is “Blade Runner”?)

The flaw in this notion is that if a person requires an internal homunculus proxy to perceive the world, it follows that said homunculus must rely on its own even tinier, more disgusting homunculus proxy. And so on. This conceptual roadblock is known as infinite regression, and it represents, among other things, the intersection between homunculi in science and homunculi in philosophy.

Divorced from unsettling, naked men, infinite regress is still a popular philosophical rejoinder, especially during disputes about consciousness.

(Brief history lesson: It was 20th century philosopher Gilbert Ryle who initially spelled out these types of arguments in depth, initially using the example of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “The ancestor of every action is a thought.” Ryle essentially argued that if, in fact, every intelligent action is preceded by a conscious thought, and a conscious thought is, in itself, an intelligent action, then, etc.)

One classic (though woefully out-dated) philosophical argument about the nature of human consciousness is Descartes notion of dualism (AKA the mind-body problem) – that the mind is non-physical entity separate from the material brain. Descartes even identified the pineal gland as the area of the brain where this immaterial vapor soul thing resided. Cognitive science has since discredited this notion, leaving philosophers to reconstruct an entirely new model of human consciousness.

Lo, gaze yonder! The homunculi are returning! And contemporary American philosopher Daniel Dennett is carrying them in an adorable papoose. Dennett is extremely concerned that, even as philosophers attempt to divorce themselves from the long-standing notions of Cartesian dualism, its ghost haunts even the most logical materialist argument. He calls this effect Cartesian materialism, and basically argues that if you take Descartes’ intangible mind and regard it as physical, but still approach the mind and brain as separate material entities, the newly tangible mind entity becomes, in essence, a homunculus, perched back up inside the human head for the first time since that whole vision debacle, absorbing stimuli and whispering analyses into the cortex. And if that little guy’s up there functioning as our consciousness, then he himself is conscious and must have… well, you know the drill.

Centuries after the alchemists started trying to grow lab partners out of semen-smeared foodstuffs, the tiny man-creatures known as homunculi got their first big promotion. To understand how these pint-sized chaps wormed their way into 17th century scientific comprehension – and, in fact, directly into the human genitals – it helps to understand the theory of preformation. In the 17th century, people (scientists included) believed that when God created the universe, he had simultaneously created every living creature that would ever exist, such that animals were like Russian nesting dolls, packed with a theoretically infinite number of successively smaller versions of themselves that would go on maturing and birthing each other for generations. The ramifications for humans? Loins stuffed to bursting with tiny people – homunculi (who, in turn, have mini-homunculi inside their own tiny junk [et al]).

Beyond a shrugged “sex = babies?,” little was known about the specifics of human reproduction, so when Dutch tradesman Antoine Van Leeuwenhoek rubbed one out on his microscope and discovered spermatozoa, only one rational explanation came to mind: these cells were the tiny wriggling vehicles that the pre-formed future humans – the tiny Homunculi – piloted up through a woman’s vagina and into the womb, where they then grow to baby size. The idea sounded a little crazy, and not everyone was on board – some folks were convinced that the homunculi actually drove the ova, which had been discovered several years earlier. This controversy led to one of the great dead-end rivalries of proto-modern science: Spermists (or, as spell check is concerned, “Spearmints”) vs. Ovists. So the diehard Spearmints tried to explain why God would kill off millions of preformed humans in every batch of ejaculate. The Ovists struggled to understand why sperm, and, hence, men, are necessary if all future humans already exist within women. No one had any friggin’ idea why some children looked more like their mothers, some more like their fathers and others more like Uncle Jake, who isn’t really even their uncle. Mom just says to call him that.

Finally, the whole mess was brought to a screeching halt by spontaneous generation, a theory that seemed to nullify both sides, and found the homunculi pitched headfirst through the windshield of whatever sex cell they’d been illegally operating. Excited by Leeuwenhoek’s sperm revelation, scientists had started putting all kinds of crap under microscope lenses. What they found again and again – in broth and beer and bread – were tiny organisms that had seemingly sprout (or spontaneously generated) out of thin air. In an age before any understanding of microorganisms, this discovery seemed to demonstrate that new (read: non-preformed) living things could simply be grown out of inanimate matter. People began wondering if maybe human reproduction worked by a similar principle.

And with all the confidence of the alchemists, who had essentially used the tenets of spontaneous generation to imagine homunculi in the first place, scientists kicked homunculi to the curb, flipped off god and started trying to create life in sealed vials of mud (spoiler alert: epic fail. LOLZ).

Friday – Homunculi and Philosophy

Gizmodo reports that the brains at MIT have decided to take a new direction for creating Artificial Intelligence. They’ve thrown out some age old assumptions and are considering new alternatives to concepts line the Turing Test.

We’re glad somebody decided it was time to bring Skynet online sooner than later. We don’t want to be in the geriatric ward when it’s time to fight the machines.

Gizmodo

Ages ago, mineralogical pseudo-sorcerers worked to exact divine control over human mortality using a strange hybrid of magic, meditation and metallurgy. In the 1600s, scientists hunched over simple microscopes scrabbled to understand the then-mysterious miracle of human reproduction. Modern day philosophers use advanced rhetoric to dispute classical notions of free will and the human soul. The common thread that connects all three? A teeny little naked guy called a homunculus (Latin for “little human”).

Small, brawny Homunculi run riot through the history of academic thought, offering scientists bizarre answers to life’s mysteries, all the while stealing polished buttons off formal wear and ripping pictures of boobs out of library books in order to construct their nests. It all started with the alchemists. While these rock-boiling polimaths are primarily remembered as the misguided dreamers who sought to transform common substances into gold, they were into plenty of other ambitious nuttiness, including the development of an eternal life elixir and the search for the so-called universal solvent – a theoretical chemical that could dissolve absolutely anything (much of their philosophical energies were ultimately exhausted in squabbling over the design of an insoluble container to store the solvent.) Homunculi entered the fray sometime during the 3rd century, after the Gnostic mystic Zosimos wrote about how he liked to mentally anthropomorphize various metals so that they took the form of tiny men who would writhed before him, enduring ungodly bodily tortures as a means of attaining alchemical transfiguration. And with that one nugget of wild insanity, Homunculi were born. Alchemists took the notion of these minuscule man-servants quite literary and began attempting to create them by combining various natural ingredients. (If you don’t like to picture old, bearded men jizzing all over everything, you should probably stop reading now.)

There are a variety of recipes for growing a homunculus, who will then serve its creator as a protector and willing gofer/lab assistant. The easiest method: allow a hearty load of human semen to putrefy in a sealed container until the goo resembles a transparent man, at which point all you have to do is feed the man fresh blood and he will grow into an itty bitty personal assistant. Another method involves poking a hole in an egg, filling the hole with human semen and then burying the egg and waiting for a homunculus to emerge from the ground. And on and on. Like every other aspect of alchemy, the homunculus-generation process underscores the belief that a communion of intellect and spiritual openness can reveal divinity through science and imbue scholars with the power of God.

Even the more traditional science of the 1600s relied on creationist notions, and would also come to briefly rely on the diminutive homunculi.

Wednesday: Homunculi and Spontaneous Generation

LiveScience is reporting that the latest core sample data gives more credibility to the scientifically challenged sci-fi movie The Day After Tomorrow’s rapid freezing scenario. Except we suspect they didn’t actually see the movie because the rapid freezing scenario there was literally a wall of freeze that hits you like a beam from Mr. Freeze’s freeze gun.

Anyhow, the latest data supports the idea that rapid melting could lead to rapid cooling in the Northern Hemisphere.

Starting roughly 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was gripped by a chill that lasted some 1,300 years. Known by scientists as the Younger Dryas and nicknamed the “Big Freeze,” geological evidence suggests it was brought on when a vast pulse of fresh water – a greater volume than all of North America’s Great Lakes combined – poured into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

For a different reference to what a rapidly frozen world could be like we suggest the Paul Newman film Quintet.

link: Big Freeze: Earth Could Plunge into Sudden Ice Age – Yahoo! News

So what is the Singularity? Check out Ray Kurzweil’s TED talks to get a jump start.

Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us

Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness.

A university for the coming singularity

Ray Kurzweil’s latest graphs show that technology’s breakneck advances will only accelerate — recession or not. He unveils his new project, Singularity University, to study oncoming tech and guide it to benefit humanity.

Just last week, I mentioned the waddling, headless meat mutants that have been erroneously cited as the source of KFC’s chicken. In Florida, rumors of bizarre genetic experimentation are still used to explain the pervasive presence of sex-crazed flies referred to as “love bugs” (in truth, the insects are South American natives that are believed to have hitched a ride on a North America-bound freighter sometime in the 1920s). Urban legends featuring bizarre animal experimentation (and the resulting grotesqueries) are six for a nickel. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things takes a look at the top-shelf stuff – Real animals. Actual experiments.

Today: In Soviet Russia, Dog’s Head Transplants You

Before Soviet scientists began launching dogs into outer space, they spent a couple decades cutting the animals up, reconfiguring them and benefitting science via cruel and twisted experiments. Sergei Bruyukhonenko, for example, was known as the dog decapitator. He earned this fitting (though perhaps sensationalistic) moniker during his quest to introduce open-heart surgery to the USSR. In the 1920s, Bruyukhonenko invented the “autojektor,” a simple apparatus that was designed to fill in for a patient’s heart and lungs while doctors futzed around inside his or her chest cavity. To test the machine, Bruyukhonenko simply lopped the head off a dog, wired all the tubes and vessels up to the autojektor and watched in delight as the pup’s disembodied noggin came back to life (clinical low-brain-function life, not high-enthusiasm Beggin’ Strips-commercial life). The doctor was so pleased with his results, he held a public demonstration of the autojektor, during which he entertained the audience by feeding a dog’s head some cheese, which promptly oozed out of the neck through the disconnected esophagus (some Russians still grate cheese this way).

Thirty years later, an eager young scientist named Vladimir Demikhov showed up with a smile and a sewing kit. Demikhov was interested in perfecting live organ transplants – specifically heart transplants – and set about practicing on animals. While he made several important contributions to transplant medicine, he’s best remembered for a 1954 experiment in which he detached a puppy’s head, shoulders and front legs, and then sutured them, alive, onto the back of an adult dog. Remember the nasty esophagus cheese that leaked back out of Bruyukhonenko’s dog? This time it was milk, and it gushed out all over the host dog (some Russians still bathe dogs this way). Sadly, after only a couple weeks, the pitiable beast died of infection. Supposedly, though Demikhov never found a way to successfully transplant a heart, he did go on to make 19 more bizarre pup-and-dog recombinations, none of which survived longer than a month.

Less than ten years later, Rob White, a scientist in Cleveland (coincidentally, a city that measures its collective morale in units called “Trotskys” [1 Trotsky = -5 smiles]), used Demikhov’s transplantation techniques as a jumping off point to successfully perform the complete transplant of one monkey’s severed melon onto another’s decapitated body. Post-surgery, the plug-and-play primate, though paralyzed, retained use of its core senses. According to White’s notes, the monkey bit several lab techs.

This grumpy, neck-sutured, paralytic simian is the perfect segue into Wednesday’s diabolical (again Soviet) scheme – the monkey/human hybrid.