The image of Demikhov adding transplanted dog heads does give the impression of an eccentric pursuing a pointless path. However, Vladimir Demikhov was actually blazing a genuine path of scientific inquiry, not science fiction, which he called "transplantology," or the study of organ transplants.
In an article for The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, Dr. Harris Schumacker lauds Demikhov as being the first person to "transplant an auxillary heart into the thorax of a warm-blooded animal, first to replace the heart with a homograft organ, first to carry out a pulmonary transplantation, and first to perform a complete heart and lung replacement." Even in the case of the two-headed dogs, there was an actual point to them, as Demikhov explained in the Life article: His tests revealed that the failure lies with the transplanted part, so a woman who was bothering him for a leg transplant, for instance, could now receive one with minimal risk: "The main problem will be joining the nerves so the woman can control her movements... But I am sure we can lick that problem too."
While attaching human heads to new bodies still seems out of reach, according to Popular Science, the fact that we can take a beating heart and put it inside another person's body would have struck an early twentieth century scientist as fanciful. Now, it's perfectly possible.
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