Education, The science
Petr Kuzmich Anokhin, academician: biography, contribution to science
The largest scientist-physiologist of the XX century, Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin - an academician, founder of the famous scientific school, the founder of new branches of the science of the brain, which became the harbinger of cybernetics - went the way typical for the Soviet scientist.
"I was born in the Ravine"
He recalled that the father and mother were illiterate and signed 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 person - was a native of the Don Cossacks. From mother - Agrafena Prokofievna, a native of the Penza province - he got a lively and sociable character, and the main feature of the boy was curiosity and the desire for knowledge.
Before the revolution, he received a secondary education - he graduated from the real school (1914) and entered the land-agronomic school in Novocherkassk. Soon he denotes interest in biological science, knowledge of man, in particular, about his brain. He begins to be actively interested in scientific literature on this subject, to communicate with the teachers of natural science, who could at least give direction for his educational aspirations.
Member of the Civil War
Proletarian origin made it natural for Anokhin to take part 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 threatened, and the young man participated in his defense - he was appointed inspector of the headquarters for the erection of military fortifications. In 1920, he actively works in communist propaganda - he becomes a press commissioner in Novocherkassk and a responsible editor of the main newspaper of the Don district - "Red Don".
Here there is a serious writer's talent, which Academician Anokhin always distinguished later on. Pyotr Kuzmich writes most editorials and a lot of articles for the newspaper. Their lively and imaginative language attracts the attention of the People's Commissar for Education, A.V. Lunacharsky, who made agitation trips to the front. He wanted to get acquainted with the young author, and there is a meeting that had a fateful character for the future scientist. Anokhin told the People's Commissar about his desire to learn about his interest in the design of the human brain, which he preserved during all the turbulent events in the country.
Bekhterev School
Soon a letter came in which asked to send Anokhin to study for the famous scientist - Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, who directed the State Institute of Medical Knowledge in Petrograd. In 1921, Pyotr Kuzmich goes to study at this educational institution. As Anokhin later wrote, Academician Bekhterev made for him the main thing - he was forever attached to the global, universal scientific problem - to the mystery of the work of the human brain, when from the first year he was attracted to real research work.
However, soon the student Anokhin realizes that he is not attracted by psychiatry - the main direction of Bekhterev's scientific activity. He sees in it too much of an unclear and unsaid, that which is expressed only in verbal form. He is more attracted by the physiology of the work of the brain, the possibility of studying it by setting up experiments with obtaining concrete results. At that time Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was the main authority in this field. It was in his laboratory that Anokhin entered in 1922. Academician Pavlov draws a young scientist to experiments on internal inhibition - the bottleneck of his theory of conditioned reflexes.
A faithful disciple of Pavlov
Fear routine in science, not allow a one-sided view in the work, avoid blindly following the same conclusions, even if they are part of an apparent harmonious theory - as the great physiologist taught his staff. Therefore, when the article "On dialectical materialism and mental problems" appeared in 1924, in which some employees of Pavlov's laboratory saw an attempt on the main provisions of the doctrine of conditioned reflexes, and whose author was Anokhin, the academician himself rose to defend the young scientist.
On the recommendation of Pavlov, Anokhin first became a lecturer in the Department of Physiology of the Leningrad Zootechnical Institute, and then a professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Nizhny Novgorod. On the basis of this faculty, the Gorky Medical Institute was founded, where Anokhin begins his independent scientific and pedagogical activity at the Department of Physiology. The academician, whose biography was for a long time associated with Gorky, left a notable mark in 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, in 1932 a branch of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine was established, the director of which became Anokhin.
In 1935 he was transferred to work at VNIEM in Moscow as 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 studies played an important role during Anokhin's work on the problems of military traumas of the peripheral nervous system during the Great Patriotic War.
The struggle for the purity of scientific series
Many historians of Russian science say that the removal of Anokhin from the capital to the periphery - in the then Nizhny Novgorod, was made at the initiative of Pavlov, in order to save him from the inevitable persecution for too independent ideas and actions. So many ideological fighters shocked Anokhin's decision to stop paying party fees to voluntarily quit the party. He considered that social work could prevent him from pursuing scientific studies.
Anokhin-student, and Anokhin-academician proclaimed their loyalty to the fundamental provisions of the Pavlovian theory. The scientist argued that the greatest harm to the domestic science was brought by those interpreters of the legacy of the great physiologist, who in the category of immutable truths by unintelligence brought the ideas expressed by Pavlov as only assumptions or possible assumptions that do not affect the content and truth of the basic postulates of the theory.
The defeat of Soviet physiology
Subsequently, much will be remembered for him at the famous Pavlovian 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 cleansed. Several leading scientists, respected throughout the scientific world, were subjected to cruel persecution for "deviations from the teachings of Academician Pavlov" and for admiring the bourgeois idealistic trends in physiological science. The closest and most faithful pupils of Pavlov - L.Orbeli, A.Speransky, I.Beritashvili, L.Shtern were ostracized. 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 Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, created by him in 1944, was removed from the 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 logical result of the development of the 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 processes of the vital activity of the organism due to the existence in it of special private associations and organizations acting with the help of nervous and humoral (carried out through liquid media) regulations.
Such systems are called self-regulating, as there is a constant 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 to the science of methods of obtaining, transmitting, storing and transforming information - cybernetics. The father of this science - Norbert Wiener - highly valued the work, the author of which was academician Anokhin. The photo taken during the joint walk of Wiener and Anokhin across Moscow became a symbol of the close relationship of the two sciences.
Biological theories of emotion, the theory of wakefulness and sleep, hunger and saturation, the mechanisms of internal inhibition - these problems Anokhin actively engaged in recent years. He combined research with organizational activities in domestic and foreign scientific societies, participation in the editorial boards of numerous publications, etc.
PC. Anokhin ended his life on March 5, 1974, leaving a good reputation for his human qualities and a huge scientific legacy.
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