The tale of the dog behind the 'kiss of life' discovery

This 'kiss of life' has an intriguing history stretching back over 100 years to when electricity was first being installed in domestic homes and, in part, it owes its discovery to the fate of an unnamed lab dog. Throughout the early 1900s an electrical revolution hit America, and homes became populated with electrical appliances - everything from light bulbs to refrigerators. But, on the down side, electrocution was a major risk to people working on the newly-installed power lines. Many died of cardiac arrests. As a result, external defibrillators had been invented to shock the heart back into rhythm without opening the chest - but they were too big and cumbersome to use outside of hospitals.

In the 1950s, the Edison Electric Institute in the US decided to sponsor researchers to investigate the effects of electrical currents on the heart. Enter Guy Knickerbocker, a fastidious, 29-year-old graduate working under electrical engineer William Kouwenhoven in one of the labs at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. They were trying to improve the external defibrillator, which Kouwenhoven had invented a few years earlier. In 1958, before the ethical treatment of animals became a serious consideration, their experiments involved testing on laboratory dogs.
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