Vladimir Demikhov

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Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov (Russian: ; Kulini Farm, July
18, 1916 Moscow, November 22, 1998) was a Soviet scientist and organ transplant pioneer,
who performed several transplantations in the 1930s and 1950s, such as the transplantation of
a heart into an animal and a lung-heart replacement in an animal. He is also well known for
his transplantation of the heads of dogs.[1][2] He conducted his dog head transplants during the
1950s, resulting in two-headed dogs, and this ultimately led to the head transplants in
monkeys by Dr. Robert White, who was inspired by Demikhov's work.

The last dog head transplant performed by Vladimir Demiknov on January 13, 1959 in GDR
Demikhov coined the term "transplantology," and his 1960 monograph Experimental
transplantation of vital organs, for which he received his doctoral degree, later published in
1962 in New York, Berlin and Madrid, became the world's first monograph on
transplantology, and was for a long time the only monograph in the field of transplantation of
organs and tissues.[3] Christiaan Barnard, who performed the world's first heart transplant
operation from one person to another person in 1967, twice visited the Demikhov's laboratory
in 1960 and 1963. Barnard through all his life considered Demikhov as his teacher.[citation needed]
Demikhov died in obscurity in 1998, but he was awarded the Order of Merit for the
Fatherland, 3rd class, shortly before his death. He had also received a USSR State Prize.
The Russian documentary "Experiments in the Revival of Organisms" depicts similar
experiments carried out in the Soviet Union.

In popular culture
Film of this surgery appears in "La Rabbia" (Anger), a 1959 film in which Pier Paolo Pasolini
and Giovannino Guareschi separately present hour-long episodes of their opposing political

positions. The surgery segment is in the second part by Guareschi who vigorously condemns
it.