Well I guess I always knew that these things were out there, but I just never thought I'd come accross them! well, I guess I should warn that this was pretty... grusome? in my openion, so if you don't want to read, don't!

I was watching the movie The X Files: I Want to Beleive, when there was this small part about russian experaments on dogs useing this tranquilizer. Well I thought it would be just something made up for the movie, so what do I do? Yup, I have the computer in my lab, so I go to my favorite information headquarters: google.

After several misspellings of the drug and a few keyword changes later, I find an urban legonds site as my top search result. So here I am, thinking that I'm right and it's just a story made up for the movie, but when I click on it, I find out that it's real! [link]

A man named Sergei Brukhonenko performed these disturbing experaments on dogs that had to do with "artificail life" and were the basis for the modern open heart surgery. He actually manages to keep the head of a dog alive after bringing it to a clinical death by removing all the blood... and he made a video of it. [link] (though the video has been disputed as fake, his experimentation was definately real!)

So then I started thinking about it... The experiments themselves seem so monstrous! There is even pictuers (not sure if they are real) of two headed dogs, where the living head of one dog was grafted onto the body of another. But if you think about it, how many lives does open heart surgery save each day? Is it less wrong if the torture of these animals saves lives every day? It just brougt up a lot of moral questions for me. I mean, does the bigger picture sometimes justify smaller wrongs? If a terrible thing could do so much good, is it any less terrible?

Well anyway, just wanted to share those philisophical (<-- can't spell...) questions with you along with what led to them.