Pavloff

Ivan Petrovitch Pavloff (Pavlov of Pawlow--take your choice of Russian transliterations), physiologist, Nobel Prizewinner and indubitably the most distinguished living scientist of Russia, sailed from New York for France, July 14, on the Majestic, after a series of mishaps that would furnish plot for a modern Comedy of Errors. He had been in America three weeks, but few, even in scientific circles, knew it until he was about to leave. Pavloff has no stomach for publicity. Scarcely had he set foot on our soil, in company with his son, Dr. Vladimir Pavloff, a professor of physics, who studied under Sir Joseph Thomson, when he was robbed at the Grand Central Terminal of $2,000--all his ready cash. The Pavloffs were adopted as guests by the Rockefeller Institute when scientific colleagues learned of their plight, and money was immediately advanced by the Rockefeller organizations and other friends.

Dr. Pavloff's next destination was to have been the Edinburgh Congress of Physiology, which he had been officially invited to address, but the British Consulate in New York refused to vise his passport because subjects of Soviet Russia are not being admitted to the tight little island without special permission from the Foreign Office. Pavloff, being a citizen of Russia, necessarily travels under a passport granted by its government, but he is personally an anti-Bolshevik and takes no part in politics. The French consul was more of a realist, and the professor will probably land at Cherbourg and go home, but not via Edinburgh. Britain, and not Pavloff, will be the loser. Commenting on his trying experiences, Dr. Pavloff said he was going back to Russia, where there is "law and order."

Pavloff is 75 years old, tall, white-haired, majestic, active. The son of a priest of the Russian Church, he studied medicine at St. Petersburg, became a military surgeon, and in 1891 was appointed director of the Physiological Institute of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and later professor of physiology in the University of St. Petersburg. Pavloff founded a new school of physiologists, which became one of the most productive in the world, his researches dealing chiefly with the action of the heart, the secretions of the glands, and the digestive processes. Among his famous collaborators were Bechterew and Popielski. He is now professor emeritus, but still directs his laboratory in Petrograd, with a staff of 30 scientists under him. Despite his opposing beliefs, the Soviet Government has protected him, supported his work, published his collected papers.

Pavloff's name is best known to the Western world for his classic demonstration of the neurological basis of the digestive process in dogs. A normal animal, if hungry, shows increased flow of saliva and the digestive juices at the sight or smell of food. By a simple surgical operation, Pavloff brought the duct of a dog's salivary gland to the surface of the cheek and measured the flow under stimulus of food. At regular feeding times a bell was rung, and after several repetitions it was found that the sound of the bell alone, without food, stimulated the saliva. This process, known as a "conditioned reflex," has been repeated in scores of forms by physiologists and psychologists on both animal and human subjects. It forms the basis of much of modern " behavioristic " psychology, and suggests how reflexes and instincts can be re-educated into new habits of conduct.

In another brilliant experiment, following the investigations of von Bischoff and Heidenhain, Pavloff was able to produce a fistula, or tube, connecting the stomach of a dog with the surface, keeping the animal free from pain and under the most normal conditions possible. By this means he studied the flow of the gastric and pancreatic juices under varying conditions, proving that the secretions vary in quantity, rate and digestive power with the nature of the food.

Pavloff was given the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1904 for the work embodied in his lectures delivered in 1897 on The Work of the Digestive Glands, which has been translated into German, French, English. It has been the inspiration of similar researches by Starling in England and Cannon in the United States. He has received scientific honors and decorations in practically every civilized nation.