The greatest physiologist of the 20th century Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin - academician, founder of a famous scientific school, founder of new branches of brain science that became a harbinger of cybernetics - went through a path typical of a Soviet scientist.
Coming from a simple, working-class family, he became a world-famous physiologist, bringing priority to Soviet science in many branches of neurophysiology, while being periodically harassed for his unwillingness to follow an officially approved, ideologically verified course in science.
I was born in the Ravine
He recalled that his father and mother were illiterate and signed with two crosses. This was a common occurrence among the inhabitants of the Ravine, the most proletarian part of Tsaritsyn. Here, in the family of a railway worker, the future academician Anokhin was born. His date of birth is January 27, 1898. Father - Kuzma Vladimirovich - a stern and silent man - was a native of the Don Cossacks. From his mother - Agrafena Prokofievna, originally from the Penza province - he got a lively and sociable character, and the main feature of the boy wascuriosity and desire for knowledge.
Before the revolution, he received a secondary education - he graduated from a real school (1914) and entered the land surveying and agronomic school in the city of Novocherkassk. Soon he denotes for himself an interest in biological science, in knowledge about a person, in particular, about his brain. He begins to take an active interest in the scientific literature on the subject, to communicate with science teachers who could at least give direction to his educational aspirations.
Participant in the civil war
Proletarian origin made it natural for Anokhin to participate in the revolutionary events of 1917, and then in the civil war on the side of the Bolsheviks. During the Cossack uprising in February 1918, Tsaritsyn was under threat, and the young man participated in his defense - he was appointed inspector of the headquarters for the construction of military fortifications. In 1920, he actively worked in communist propaganda - he became the press commissar in Novocherkassk and the executive editor of the main newspaper of the Don District - Krasny Don.
Here, a serious writing talent is manifested, which Academician Anokhin always distinguished later. Pyotr Kuzmich writes most of the editorials and a lot of articles for the newspaper. Their lively and figurative language attracts the attention of the People's Commissar of Education A. V. Lunacharsky, who made propaganda trips to the front. He wanted to meet the young author, and a meeting took place that had a fateful character for the future scientist. Anokhin told the people's commissar about his desire to studyand about his interest in the structure of the human brain, which he kept during all the tumultuous events in the country.
Bekhterev School
Soon a letter arrived, which contained a request to send Anokhin to study with the famous scientist - Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, who headed the State Institute of Medical Knowledge in Petrograd. In 1921, Pyotr Kuzmich entered this educational institution to study. As Anokhin wrote later, Academician Bekhterev did the main thing for him - he forever tied him to a global, universal scientific problem - to the secret of the work of the human brain, when from the first year he was attracted to this research work.
However, student Anokhin soon realizes that he is not attracted to psychiatry - the main direction of Bekhterev's scientific activity. He sees in it too much vague and unsaid, what is expressed only in verbal form. He is more attracted to the physiology of the brain, the possibility of studying it by setting up experiments with obtaining specific results. At that time, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the main authority in this area. It was in his laboratory that Anokhin entered in 1922. Academician Pavlov engages the young scientist in experiments on internal inhibition, the bottleneck of his theory of conditioned reflexes.
Faithful disciple of Pavlov
To be afraid of the routine in science, not to allow a one-sided look in the work, to avoid blindly following the same conclusions, even if they are part of a seemingly harmonious theory - this is how the great physiologist taught his employees. Therefore, when in 1924 the article “On Dialectical Materialism and Mental Problems” appeared, in which some employees of the Pavlovian laboratory saw an attempt on the basic provisions of the doctrine of conditioned reflexes, and the author of which was Anokhin, the academician himself stood up for the young scientist.
On the recommendation of Pavlov, Anokhin first becomes a teacher in the Department of Physiology of the Leningrad Zootechnical Institute, and then a professor in the Medical Faculty of the University of Nizhny Novgorod. On the basis of this faculty, the Gorky Medical Institute was formed, where Anokhin began his independent scientific and pedagogical activity at the Department of Physiology. The academician, whose biography was associated with Gorky for a long time, left a noticeable mark on the history of the institute and the entire city.
Institute of Experimental Medicine
On the basis of the Department of Physiology of the Gorky Medical Institute, which Anokhin turned into one of the best in the country, a branch of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine was created in 1932, of which Anokhin became the director.
In 1935, he was transferred to work at VNIEM in Moscow as the head of the department of neurophysiology, in which he is actively engaged in experimental studies of higher nervous activity. He establishes active links with clinical institutions, where he conducts joint research with practicing neurologists and neurosurgeons. The results of these works have played an important role inAnokhin's work on the problems of military injuries of the peripheral nervous system during the Great Patriotic War.
Struggle for the purity of scientific ranks
Many historians of Russian science argue that Anokhin's removal from the capital to the periphery - to the then Nizhny Novgorod, was initiated by Pavlov in order to save him from the inevitable persecution for too independent ideas and actions. So many ideological fighters were shocked by Anokhin's decision to stop paying party dues in order to voluntarily leave the party. He felt that community service might interfere with his scientific studies.
Both Anokhin the student and Anokhin the academician proclaimed their loy alty to the fundamental provisions of the Pavlovian theory. The scientist argued that those interpreters of the legacy of the great physiologist brought the greatest harm to domestic science, who, due to unreasonableness, brought the ideas expressed by Pavlov as mere assumptions or possible assumptions that did not affect the content and truth of the basic postulates of the theory.
The defeat of Soviet physiology
Subsequently, he will remember a lot at the famous Pavlovsk session - a joint meeting of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, which took place in the summer of 1950. On it, following genetics, Soviet physiology was purged. Several leading scientists, respected throughout the scientific world, were subjected to severe persecution for "deviations from the teachings of Academician Pavlov" and for worshiping bourgeois idealistdirections of physiological science. The closest and most faithful students of Pavlov - L. Orbeli, A. Speransky, I. Beritashvili, L. Stern were subjected to ostracism. The views expressed by Academician Anokhin were also subjected to harsh criticism. Pyotr Kuzmich, whose biography was associated with the Institute of Physiology at the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, which he created in 1944, was removed from leadership and until 1953 - until Stalin's death - worked as a professor at the Department of Physiology of the Medical Institute in Ryazan.
Main scientific contribution
The theory of functional systems is a natural result of the development of Pavlovian theory. This theory is considered by many to be the main scientific achievement of the scientist, his most important contribution to the world science of the human brain. It consists in describing the life processes of an organism due to the existence in it of special private associations and organizations that act with the help of nervous and humoral (carried out through liquid media) regulations.
Such systems are called self-regulating because there is continuous improvement. The result of the action of such systems is a behavioral act, for the evaluation of which there is a reverse afferentation - feedback. This concept is fundamental for the science of methods of obtaining, transmitting, storing and transforming information - cybernetics. The father of this science, Norbert Wiener, highly valued the works authored by Academician Anokhin. The photo taken during a joint walk of Viner and Anokhin in Moscow has become a symbol of the close relationship between the two sciences.
Biologic althe theory of emotions, the theory of wakefulness and sleep, hunger and satiety, the mechanisms of internal inhibition - Anokhin has been actively involved in these problems in recent years. He combined scientific research with organizational activities in domestic and foreign scientific societies, participation in the editorial boards of numerous publications, etc.
P. K. Anokhin ended his life on March 5, 1974, leaving a good reputation for his human qualities and a huge scientific heritage.
