1849–1936
○ Pneumonia
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.
Activities and affiliations
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
From Digestive Physiology to Conditioned-Reflex Research
Pavlov’s research on conditioned reflexes grew out of experimental methods for observing digestion over time. Appointed in 1890 to organize and direct the physiology department at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, he used fistulas in what he called the “chronic experiment” to measure organ functions continuously under relatively normal conditions. Unlike acute experiments that observed an animal after surgery and disrupted its ordinary relations, this method allowed investigators to examine interactions among organs. Pavlov showed the nervous system’s central role in regulating digestive secretion, work for which he received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
While measuring secretions, Pavlov investigated why dogs salivated in response to stimuli associated with food even before eating. Using a salivary-duct fistula method developed by his colleague D. D. Glinskii, he rejected a purely subjective account of this “psychic secretion” and explained it as a temporary reflex. Pavlov discussed conditioned reflexes at the 1903 International Medical Congress in Madrid and developed the theory through systematic experiments. In 1905, he proposed that an external stimulus coinciding in time with an ordinary reflex could become a new conditioned signal. Pavlov and his research team investigated the cerebral cortex and built a research program on higher nervous activity, experimentally studying the formation and inhibition of conditioned reflexes and an organism’s responses to its environment. A measurement technique developed through research on canine saliva thus expanded into a physiological program for studying learning and nervous activity objectively.