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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Sechenov Ivan Mikhailovich Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
The contribution of this scientist to science was aptly described by IP Pavlov, who called Sechenov "the father of Russian physiology." Indeed, with his name, physiology not only entered world science, but also occupied one of the leading places in it. Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov was born on August 1 (13), 1829 in the village of Teply Stan, Kurmysh district, Simbirsk province. His father, Mikhail Alekseevich, was a military man in his youth, served in the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment, but then retired with the rank of second major and settled in the village. Mother, Anisya Yegorovna, was a peasant woman, whom only marriage (she married her master) freed from serfdom. The childhood of the future scientist-physiologist passed in the village, until the age of fourteen he did not leave Teply Stan. After the death of his father, the financial situation of the family worsened, and the boy had to learn the basics of science at home. Then Ivan was assigned to a military school so that he began to study as an engineer. In 1843, Ivan went to St. Petersburg, where in a few months he prepared and successfully passed the entrance exams to the Main Engineering School. However, Sechenov did not get along with his superiors and was not admitted to the senior class of the school to become a military engineer. With the rank of ensign, he was released and sent to an ordinary sapper battalion. Two years later, Sechenov resigned, left military service and entered the medical faculty of Moscow University. A thoughtful and diligent student, Sechenov initially studied very diligently. Interestingly, in his junior years, he dreamed, by his own admission, not of physiology, but of comparative anatomy. In his senior years, after becoming acquainted with the main medical subjects, Sechenov became disillusioned with the medicine of that time. “The fault of my betrayal of medicine,” he later wrote, “was that I did not find in it what I expected - instead of theories, naked empiricism ... Diseases, due to their mystery, did not arouse the slightest interest in me, since the key to understanding them it didn't make sense..." Sechenov became interested in psychology and philosophy. During these years, Sechenov entered the circle of progressive Moscow youth, grouped around the famous writer Apollon Grigoriev. Sechenov lived very modestly in his student years - he rented small rooms. The money that his mother sent him from the village was barely enough for food, and you still had to pay tuition fees. In his senior years, finally convinced that medicine was not his vocation, Sechenov began to dream of physiology. After graduating from the course, Sechenov, among the three most capable students, passed not the usual medical, but more difficult - doctoral exams. Having successfully passed them, he received the right to prepare and defend his doctoral dissertation. After a successful defense, Sechenov went abroad "with the firm intention of studying physiology." Since that time, physiology has become a matter of his whole life. Beginning in 1856, he spent several years abroad, working with the greatest physiologists in Europe - Helmholtz, Dubois-Reymond, Bernard. In the same place, he writes his doctoral dissertation "Materials for the Physiology of Alcohol Intoxication", for which he puts experiments on himself! Returning to Russia after defending his dissertation on March 8, 1860, he became a professor at the St. Petersburg Medical Academy. Already the first lectures of the thirty-year-old professor of physiology attracted general interest. His speeches were distinguished not only and not so much by the simplicity and clarity of presentation, but by their novelty, unusual content, richness, facts of the latest achievements of science. Sechenov's lectures on electrophysiology aroused such wide interest that the editors of the Military Medical Journal decided to publish them. From the very beginning of his work at the Department of Physiology, Sechenov resumed intensive scientific research. "The laboratory was given to me on the ground floor of the outbuilding, next to the anatomical theater," Sechenov recalled. "It consisted of two large rooms that once served as a chemical laboratory." It was in these nondescript rooms with an ice cellar underfoot that remarkable research was carried out on the physiology of the nervous system - research that made Sechenov's name the banner of progressive Russian natural science. Already the first scientific works of Sechenov, carried out at that time, and his lectures on electrophysiology, awarded the highest award of the Academy of Sciences, clearly showed that a great, original talent entered Russian science. And it is by no means accidental that a group of scientists decided to nominate Ivan Mikhailovich as a full member of the Academy of Sciences. In the autumn of 1861, Sechenov met Maria Aleksandrovna Bokova and her friend N. P. Suslova. Both young women wanted to get a higher education, to become doctors. But they could not enter the university - at that time in Russia the path to higher education for women was closed. Then Bokova and Suslova began to attend lectures at the Medico-Surgical Academy as volunteers and, despite the difficulties, began to study medicine. Sechenov ardently sympathized with the desire of Russian women for higher education and therefore, with great willingness, helped them in their studies. Moreover, at the end of the academic year, he gave both of his students topics for scientific research. Both of Sechenov's students completed their doctoral dissertations under his guidance and defended them in Zurich. Subsequently, Maria Alexandrovna Bokova became Sechenov's wife, his constant friend. In the autumn of 1862, the scientist received an annual leave and went to Paris. He was led to the capital of France by the desire to get to know the research of the famous Claude Bernard and to work in his laboratory himself. He succeeded. Moreover, at the famous College de France, he attended a course of lectures on thermometry. The most significant result of the research conducted by Sechenov in Paris was the discovery of the so-called central inhibition - special mechanisms in the frog brain that suppress or depress reflexes. Sechenov reported this in a work published in 1863, first in French, and then in German and Russian. In the same year, the Russian journal Medical Bulletin published Sechenov's article "Reflexes of the Brain". The scientist showed for the first time that the entire complex mental life of a person, his behavior depend on external stimuli, and not on some mysterious "soul". Any irritation causes one or another response of the nervous system - a reflex. Reflexes are simple and complex. In the course of experiments, Sechenov established that the brain can delay excitation. This was a completely new phenomenon, which was called "Sechenov's inhibition." The phenomenon of inhibition discovered by Sechenov made it possible to establish that all nervous activity consists of the interaction of two processes - excitation and inhibition. Sechenov experimentally proved that if a dog's sense of smell, hearing and vision are turned off, then it will sleep all the time, since no signals from the outside world will enter its brain. This article immediately, as contemporaries testify, became known in the widest circles of Russian society. "The thoughts expressed in the Reflexes were so bold and new, the naturalist's analysis penetrated into the dark realm of mental phenomena and illuminated it with such skill and talent that the amazing impression made by the Reflexes on the whole thinking society becomes quite understandable" - wrote a prominent Russian physiologist N. M. Shaternikov. Not surprisingly, Sechenov's materialistic views led to persecution from the authorities. He was prosecuted. Sechenov received the news of an attempt to initiate a lawsuit against him with extreme calmness. To the questions of friends about the lawyer who will defend him in court, Sechenov replied: "Why do I need a lawyer? I will take a frog with me to court and do all my experiments in front of the judges: then let the prosecutor refute me." Obviously, the fear of finally disgracing himself in the eyes of Russian society, and indeed of all of Europe, forced the tsarist government to abandon the trial of the author of "Reflexes" and, reluctantly, allow the publication of the book. However, the great physiologist, the beauty and pride of Russia, remained "politically unreliable" for the tsarist government for the rest of his life. In 1866 Sechenov's classic work Physiology of the Nervous System was published. In the preface to this book, he briefly, in a few sentences, outlined the peculiar credo of an experimental physiologist: “I was mainly prompted to write the physiology of the nervous system by the fact that in all, even the best textbooks of physiology, a purely anatomical principle is placed as the basis for a particular description of nervous phenomena ... But from the first year of teaching the nervous system, I began to follow a different path, namely, I described nervous acts in lectures as they actually occur. Of particular importance in the Physiology of the Nervous System, according to the well-known Soviet psychologist M. G. Yaroshevsky, is the idea expressed here about self-regulation and feedback, one of Sechenov's general ideas, further developed by cybernetics. This idea led Sechenov to the concept of a signal and the level of organization of signals as regulators of behavior. Sechenov also studied the nervous system during a year's vacation in 1867; he spent most of this vacation in Graz, in the laboratory of his old friend Professor Rollet. Even vacation Ivan Mikhailovich always used for work. After ten years of work, he left the academy and worked for some time in a laboratory led by D. I. Mendeleev. Then for a number of years he was a professor at Novorossiysk University. Without ceasing to study the physiology of the nervous system, Sechenov became interested in a new, extremely important and little-studied problem - the state of carbon dioxide in the blood. “This seemingly simple question,” wrote Sechenov, “demanded for its solution not only experiments with all the main constituents of blood separately and in various combinations with each other, but to an even greater extent experiments with a long series of salt solutions.” In an effort to reveal the secrets of the most important physiological process of absorption of carbon dioxide by blood from tissues and the release of carbon dioxide, Sechenov deeply studied its physical and chemical essence, and then, expanding the scope of the study, makes further major discoveries in the field of the theory of solutions. In September 1869 he became a corresponding member of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In the spring of 1876, Sechenov again arrived in the city on the Neva and took up the post of professor in the department of physiology of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. Despite these difficulties, however, Sechenov carried out various physiological investigations here and obtained valuable results. He basically completed his work related to the physicochemical laws of the distribution of gases in the blood and artificial salt solutions, and in 1889 he managed to formulate the "Sechenov equation" - an empirical formula that relates the solubility of a gas in an electrolyte solution with its concentration. This equation is still in service with science. The beginning of the study of human gas exchange dates back to this time. Sechenov, as well as the general scientific community, aroused great interest in the sensation of those years - the flight of three French aeronauts on a Zenith balloon, which rose to a height of 8 kilometers. However, this flight ended tragically: two aeronauts died from suffocation. Sechenov analyzed the causes of their death, and in December 1879, in a report at the VI Congress of Naturalists and Doctors, he expressed an idea about the features of the physiological processes that occur in the human body at reduced air pressure. An exceptionally gifted and bright person, progressive in his scientific views and social convictions, a brilliant lecturer, Sechenov enjoyed great prestige among students, but his superiors did not tolerate him. And now he is forced to leave Petersburg. "I decided to replace the professorship with a more modest privat docent in Moscow," Sechenov wrote ironically. In the autumn of 1889, a pupil of Moscow University, a renowned scientist returned here, to his native land. However, as before, obstacles were created for the scientist, his scientific work was hindered in every possible way. But he could not refuse research work. Sechenov's longtime friend Karl Ludwig, who at that time was a professor at the University of Leipzig, perfectly understood Sechenov's mood, told his venerable student that as long as he lived, there would always be a room for a Russian physiologist in his laboratory. And Sechenov, deprived for almost three years of the opportunity to engage in his life's work, physiological research, almost agreed to work in Ludwig's laboratory, and in Moscow to read only lectures. However, the professor of physiology Sheremetevsky died, a vacancy appeared, and in 1891 Sechenov became a professor in the department of physiology at Moscow University. With the same energy, the scientist continues his experiments. He is finally completing his research on the theory of solutions, which was highly appreciated and confirmed in the next few years by chemists in Russia and abroad. Sechenov began research on gas exchange, constructing a number of original instruments and developing his own methods for studying the exchange of gases between blood and tissues and between the body and the environment. Admitting that "the study of respiration on the go was always my dream, which, moreover, seemed impossible," Sechenov studies human gas exchange in dynamics. As before, he pays great attention to neuromuscular physiology. His generalizing capital work "Physiology of nerve centers" is out of print. In December 1901, Sechenov left teaching at the Department of Physiology of Moscow University and went into the so-called clean resignation, that is, he refused to even give private courses. On November 2 (15), 1905, Ivan Mikhailovich died. Author: Samin D.K.
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