Nobel Prize-winning physiologist who discovered the conditioned reflex and wrote to Stalin he was 'ashamed to be called a Russian'
When a collaborator explained his ten-minute delay as a result of shooting in the streets, Pavlov exclaimed: 'What difference does a revolution make when you have experiments to do in the laboratory!'
Russian and Soviet physiologist who won the 1904 Nobel Prize for his research on the physiology of digestion and discovered classical conditioning, the conditioned reflex, through his experiments with dogs, laying the foundation for modern behavioral psychology and neuroscience. Though Lenin praised him and the Soviet government poured resources into his laboratory, Pavlov openly denounced Communist rule: in 1927 he wrote to Stalin that he was 'ashamed to be called a Russian' for what was being done to the intelligentsia, and after Kirov's murder in 1934 he protested the mass persecutions to Molotov. His materialist physiology of higher nervous activity was posthumously canonized as Soviet ideological doctrine, making 'Pavlovian science' a state orthodoxy that his own fiercely independent spirit would have rejected.
Career Timeline
- 1870–1875Studied natural science at St. Petersburg University; earned Candidate of Natural Sciences degree
- 1875–1879Studied at the Imperial Medical-Surgical Academy; graduated with a gold medal
- 1884–1886Research in Germany under Carl Ludwig and Rudolf Heidenhain in Leipzig and Breslau
- 1890–1895Professor of Pharmacology, Military Medical Academy
- 1891–1936Director, Department of Physiology, Institute of Experimental Medicine
- 1895–1925Professor of Physiology, Military Medical Academy
- 1904Awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on digestion — first Russian Nobel laureate
- 1925–1936Director, Institute of Physiology, USSR Academy of Sciences