Pyotr Anokhin

Biography

He was born into a working-class family. In 1913 he graduated from the higher primary school. To help his family, he entered the railway as a clerk, and then passed the exams for the post of postal and telegraph official. During the same period, he passed the exams for six classes of the real school and entered the Novocherkassk Land Surveying and Agronomic College in the fall of 1915. Participated in the Civil War. In the early years of Soviet power, he was a press commissioner and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Krasny Don in Novocherkassk. A chance meeting with A.V. Lunacharsky, who toured the troops of the Southern Front with a propaganda train during this period, and the conversation about the desire to study the brain in order to "understand the material mechanisms of the human soul" becomes a landmark in the fate of Anokhin.

By the autumn of 1921, he received a call to Petrograd and a referral to study at the Leningrad State Institute of Medical Knowledge (GIMZ), which was headed by V. M. Bekhterev. Already in the 1st year, under his guidance, he conducts the first scientific work "The influence of major and minor vibrations of sounds on excitation and inhibition in the cerebral cortex".

After listening to a number of lectures by I. P. Pavlov at the Military Medical Academy, he entered his laboratory (1922).

After graduating in 1926, GIMZA was elected to the position of senior assistant at the Department of Physiology of the Leningrad Zootechnical Institute (since 1928 — associate professor). Continuing to work in the laboratory of I. P. Pavlov, the scientist performed a number of studies at the department of the Institute on the study of cerebral circulation and the effect of acetylcholine on the vascular and secretory functions of the salivary gland.

In 1930, P. K. Anokhin, recommended for the competition by I. P. Pavlov, was elected head of the Department of Physiology of the Medical Faculty of Nizhny Novgorod University. After the separation of the faculty from the university in the same year and the formation of a medical institute on its basis, he simultaneously heads the departments of physiology there and at the Faculty of Biology of Nizhny Novgorod University.

During this period, he proposed fundamentally new methods for studying conditioned reflexes: the secretory-motor method, as well as an original method with a sudden substitution of unconditional reinforcement, which allowed P. K. Anokhin to come to the conclusion about the formation of a special apparatus in the central nervous system, which contains the parameters of future reinforcement ("prepared excitation"). Later this device was called the "acceptor of the result of action" (1955).

In 1935, P. K. Anokhin introduced the concept of "sanctioning afferentation" (since 1952 - "reverse afferentation"; later, in cybernetics, - "feedback").

At the same time, in the preface to the collective monograph "Problems of the center and periphery in the physiology of nervous activity", P. K. Anokhin gives the first definition of a functional system.

"During this period of my life—" he later wrote in his autobiography— "when I was already a professor, and a concept was born that determined my research interests for the rest of my life... I managed to formulate a theory of a functional system, showing that a systematic approach is the most progressive for solving physiological problems."

With the transition in 1935 with part of the staff to Moscow to the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (VIEM), the Department of Neurophysiology was organized here, a number of studies of which were carried out jointly with the Department of micromorphology, headed by B. I. Lavrentiev, and the clinic of neurology M. B. Krol.

Since 1938, at the invitation of N. N. Burdenko, he simultaneously directs the neuropsychiatric sector of the Central Neurosurgical Institute, where he develops the theory of the nerve scar. At the same time, his joint work with the clinic of A.V. Vishnevsky on the issues of novocaine blockade dates back to this time.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War in the autumn of 1941, together with VIEM, he was evacuated to Tomsk, where he was appointed head of the neurosurgical department of peripheral nervous system injuries. Later, the results of pre-war theoretical research and neurosurgical experience were summarized by P. K. Anokhin in the monograph "Nerve plasty in military trauma of the peripheral nervous system" (1944), and also formed the basis of the theory of nerve scar formulated by him.

In 1942, he returned to Moscow and was appointed head of the physiological laboratory at the Institute of Neurosurgery. Here, along with consultations and operations, together with N. N. Burdenko, he continues research on the surgical treatment of military trauma of the nervous system. The result of these works was their joint article "Structural features of lateral nerves and their surgical treatment". At the same time, he was elected professor at the Department of Physiology of Moscow University.

In 1944, on the basis of the Department of Neurophysiology and VIEM laboratories, the Institute of Physiology was organized shortly before that of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, where P. K. Anokhin was appointed head of the Department of Physiology of the Nervous system (and at the same time in different years he served as deputy director for Scientific Work (1946) and director of the Institute).

In the autumn of 1950, at a well-known scientific session devoted to the problems of I. P. Pavlov's physiological teaching, new scientific directions developed by the physiologist's students L. A. Orbeli, I. S. Beritashvili and A. D. Speransky and others were criticized. Acute rejection was caused by Anokhin's theory of functional systems.[1][2][3]

Professor E. A. Asratyan: … When Stern, Efimov, Bernstein and others like them, who do not know either the letter or the spirit of Pavlov's teaching, speak out with individual anti-Pavlov nonsense, it is not so annoying as funny. When such a knowledgeable and experienced physiologist as I. S. Beritashvili, who is not a disciple and follower of Pavlov, speaks with anti-Pavlov concepts, it is already annoying. But when Pavlov's disciple Anokhin, under the guise of loyalty to his teacher, systematically and relentlessly seeks to revise his teaching from the rotten positions of pseudoscientific idealistic "theories" of reactionary bourgeois scientists, it is at least outrageous...[4]

As a result, P. K. Anokhin was suspended from work at the Institute of Physiology and sent to Ryazan, where he worked as a professor at the Department of Physiology of the Medical Institute until 1952.

From 1953 to 1955 he was the head of the Department of Physiology and Pathology of Higher Nervous Activity of the Central Institute of Advanced Medical Training in Moscow.

In 1955 - Professor of the Department of Normal Physiology of the 1st Moscow Medical Institute named after I. M. Sechenov. At that time, he formulated the theory of sleep and wakefulness, the biological theory of emotions, proposed an original theory of hunger and satiety, received a complete form of the theory of the functional system, gave a new interpretation of the mechanism of internal inhibition, reflected in the monograph "Internal inhibition as a problem of physiology" (1958).

Here is the characteristic of K. K. Platonov (psychologist), who was personally acquainted with P. K. Anokhin:

Pyotr Kuzmich was one of those whose closeness convinced that a person's abilities, expressed to the level of talent, become his character. He was by nature and beliefs a physiologist with a capital letter. His passion for science was so great that it reached the point of absurdity: he dropped out of the ranks of the party, ceasing to pay membership fees, sincerely believing that party work distracts him from scientific work.

- Platonov K. K. My personal meetings on the great road of life. Memories of an old psychologist. - 2005. - IP RAS. - p. 244.

P. K. Anokhin combined his scientific work with pedagogical activity, and was also the organizer and for a number of years the permanent head of the Gorky branch of the All-Union Society of Physiologists, Biochemists and Pharmacologists, a member of the Board of the All-Union Pavlov Physiological Society, in the late 1960s - the creator of the international seminar on the theory of functional systems, and in 1970-1974. - Chairman of the Moscow Physiological Society, founder and first editor-in-chief of the journal "Successes of Physiological Sciences" (1970), member of the editorial boards of a number of domestic and foreign journals, editor of the section "Physiology" of the second edition of the Great Medical Encyclopedia and a member of the editorial board of its third edition.

The last published work during Anokhin's lifetime was "System analysis of the integrative activity of a neuron" (1974), where the main ideas about the intra-neuronal processing of information were formulated.

The grave of P. K. Anokhin at the Novodevichy Cemetery

P. K. Anokhin died on March 5, 1974 in Moscow, and was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Family

Wife - Anastasia Petrovna Anokhina (1902-1993), Doctor of Medical Sciences.

Daughter - Irina Petrovna Anokhina (born May 24, 1932), narcologist, professor (since 1981), full member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences (since 1995).

Grandson - Konstantin Vladimirovich Anokhin, Russian scientist, neuroscientist, Professor, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 2019).

Works

The problem of the center and periphery in the physiology of nervous activity. - Gorky, 1935.

From Descartes to Pavlov. Three hundred years of reflex theory. - M., 1945.

Systemogenesis as a general regularity of the evolutionary process // Byull. exp. biol. and med. - 1948. - No. 8. - Vol. 26. - pp. 81-99.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. Life, activity and scientific school. - M., 1949.

Problems of higher nervous activity. - M., 1949.

General principles of compensation for impaired functions and their physiological justification. - M., 1955.

Internal inhibition as a problem of physiology. - M., 1958.

Biology and neurophysiology of conditioned reflex— - M., 1968.

Fundamental questions of the general theory of functional systems. - M., 1971.

System analysis of integrative activity of a neuron // Successes of physiological sciences. - 1974. - No. 5. - Vol. 5. - pp. 5-92.

Essays on the physiology of functional systems. - M., 1975.

Selected works. Philosophical aspects of the theory of a functional system. - M., 1978.

Selected works. Systemic mechanisms of higher nervous activity. - M., 1979.

Nodal issues of the theory of functional systems. - M., 1980.

Awards

In 1945 he was elected a full member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, in 1966 - a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.