Professor Dowell and his assistant surgeon Dr. Kern are working on medical problems including life support in separated body parts.

But Dowell's son and Marie Loren help his father's head get in front of the cameras and reveal the truth.

He interpreted the novel as an allegory for the Soviet revolution, with Dowell being comparable to its leaders, who could not predict "the horrible ends to which his activities would lead".

"[4] Real head transplant operations were semi-successfully done in Soviet Union and United States, though not on humans, and the subjects died in less than a day.

[5][unreliable source] Less than three months after the story was released, similar experiments were performed by surgeon Sergei Brukhonenko.