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and III died (again) after a few hours, having never achieved consciousness. Lazarus IV and V were more of a success. They lived on for months, though blind and severely brain damaged. It was said they inspired terror in other dogs they met.
    The press ate up the news of Cornish’s research, delivering blow-by-blow accounts of each experiment. “I could hear the breath coming back into that still body,” one reporter wrote of Lazarus II. “Slowly at first, then quickly as if the dog were running. The legs twitched. Later I heard a whine and a feeble bark.” It helped that with his brooding eyes, sallow skin, and dark hair, Cornish looked the part of a mad scientist.
    Hollywood also loved Cornish. Universal produced Life Returns (quoted from above) in 1935. It would be a totally forgettable movie—imagine a bad combination of Frankenstein and Our Gang —except that it features five minutes of Cornish’s actual experiments spliced into the action. Cornish’s work also inspired a number of Boris Karloff movies, including The Man with Nine Lives and The Man They Could Not Hang.
    The University of California, however, was not so taken with Cornish’s new line of research. Faced with complaints from animal-rights activists, the school ordered him off its campus and severed all ties with him. He retreated to his Berkeley home.
    Cornish lay low for the next thirteen years, fending off hostile neighbors who complained about sheep and dogs escaping from his lab and mystery fumes that made paint peel on surrounding buildings. But in 1947 he triumphantly returned to the headlines with news that he had perfected his technique and was ready for a bold new experiment. He would bring an executed prisoner back to life! He had moved on from teeter boards. Now he unveiled a Heath Robinson–style heart-lung machine made out of a vacuum cleaner blower, radiator tubing, an iron wheel, rollers, and a glass tube filled with sixty thousand shoelace eyes.
    San Quentin death-row prisoner Thomas McMonigle volunteered to be Cornish’s guinea pig—despite assurances that, if the experiment was successful, he would still have to remain in prison—but the experiment was never given a chance. California state authorities flatly turned down Cornish’s request.
    6 Utterly defeated, Cornish returned home and eked out a living selling a toothpaste of his own invention, Dr. Cornish’s Tooth Powder. He died of a stroke in 1963. The local paper noted in his obituary that while attending Berkeley High School as a teenager he had been the “first student ever known to wear sandals to school regularly.” It was a fitting tribute to a man who never quite fit in.

The Two-Headed Dogs of Dr. Demikhov

    A hiker wandering through the forests outside of Moscow comes across a large, official-looking building. Peering over the fence surrounding it, he sees doctors and nurses walking dogs around a courtyard. Hardly a shocking sight. But a second look leaves the hiker puzzled, and scared. There’s something different about these animals. He sees a dog limp by with one leg a conspicuously different color than the rest of its body—as though the leg had been sewn on. And could it be? Surely not. But yes! One of the other dogs has two heads.

    The Soviet Union shocked the world in 1954 when its government proudly unveiled a two-headed dog. The strange animal was the creation of Vladimir Demikhov, one of the nation’s top surgeons. He had honed his craft in field hospitals during World War II, after which the government set him up in a top-secret research center outside Moscow. His mission there was to prove the Soviet Union’s surgical preeminence.
    Demikhov created the two-headed dog by grafting the head, shoulders, and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of a mature German shepherd. Eventually he created twenty of these hybrids. However, because of postoperative infection, most of the dogs didn’t live long. The record was twenty-nine days—suggesting