The Cellar - The Animals Did it first

Sergei’s Litter
Written by Scott Cianciosi on December 20th, 2007 at 12:33 am
From DamnInteresting.com
From the 1920's through the 1950's, a Soviet scientist by the name of Sergei S. Bryukhonenko spent countless hours slaving away in his laboratory. In his homeland, he was known as a respected researcher for his influential insights into blood transfusion. Not content with his previous achievements, Bryukhonenko wanted to push his work to the very limits of possibility. His macabre research focused on the possibility of sustaining life through artificial means. His lab was home to all manner of bizarre experiments and occurrences. His staff quickly became accustomed to the sight of disembodied heads and desiccated animal corpses. As uncomfortable and ghastly as it was, his findings would prove influential to many modern medical procedures.

Bryukhonenko's intention was to create the world's first fully functional heart-lung machine. In essence, these are devices that can provide the body with oxygenated blood while a patient is otherwise unable to. This could be for a variety of reasons, most notably while in surgery for a heart transplant or bypass. It's extremely hard to operate on a beating heart, so these contraptions are needed to keep a patient alive during invasive heart surgery. Beginning his work in 1920, by 1925 Bryukhonenko’s autojector was already being shown to the general public. Consisting of automatic pumps, a reservoir for storing blood and two tubes for injecting and extracting the blood, it's a dangerous primitive looking machine by today's standards. However, by most accounts, it was dependable and performed its job adequately.

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