![]() He built a complex for experimental medicine and surrounded it with what became Russia’s first scientific village. “He couldn’t work in disorder,” Aktuganova tells me, “and so, Pavlov wrote Lenin a letter that said ‘give me a place to work in peace, or I’ll emigrate.’” The plan worked, and the scientist received approximately one million rubles worth of gold to relocate his laboratory. While Pavlov was open in his criticism of Soviet ideology, his work earned him the respect of none other than Vladimir Lenin. The outbreak of World War I, and the revolution that followed, turned the city into a chaotic scene of disorder and violence. It was located in the center of the old imperial capital, on Petrogradsky island, but the forces of history wouldn’t necessarily give Pavlov the silence he was looking for. Curiosity, combined with the mystery associated with his experiments, led to his laboratory complex being named the ‘Tower of Silence’. It was this discovery that led to his becoming a household name. Ivan Pavlov watching an experiment with a dog, summer 1934 Using his experience with the digestive system, Pavlov was able to measure the dogs’ saliva levels to confirm that, yes, their glands would eventually produce saliva in response to the bell instead of to the sight or smell of food. The bell would be rung before the dog was given meat, and so the animals eventually learned to associate the bell with being fed. To discover this, Pavlov designed soundproof chambers for the dogs to be kept in, where the only stimulus would be some food or the sound of a bell. The “conditioned reflexes” Pavlov is known for refers to how any organism with a sufficiently developed nervous system can develop special reflexes in response to its environment. It was on this base, however, that his most famous experiment would be made possible. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine every year after 1901 until winning it in 1904, not for his work with dogs, but “in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the subject has been transformed and enlarged.” Petersburg and was eventually invited to organize the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine there in 1891, which he would go on to transform into a global center for physiological research. After leaving for a stint in Germany to receive his doctorate, he returned to St. His greatest award, though, was yet to come. House-museum of academician Ivan Pavlov in the city of Ryazan where he was born Petersburg in order to do so) he won prestigious awards while still an undergraduate. Despite this, he showed a high degree of intelligence and academic potential – he was reading independently by the age of seven, and after switching from theology to physiology (moving his studies from Ryazan to St. Due to an early injury as a child, he was unable to start school until he was eleven years old. From a late bloomer to a Nobel Prize winnerīorn in 1849 in what was still the Russian Empire, Pavlov was the eldest of eleven children raised by a Russian orthodox priest and his wife. Aktuganova, the curator of a new permanent exhibition of art and science located in the basement of Pavlov’s historical lab, shares that it was the scientist himself who developed this land from a loose hamlet, once inhabited by the Finnish diaspora, into the country’s first official academic village. I had no idea before coming to Koltushi that the same hands that rang bells for dogs also cultivated whole orchards of apple trees, or that young chimpanzees used to clamor here between the trees and busts of scientists like Decartes, Mendel or Sechenov. Ivan Pavlov (second right) in his laboratory. Or how he survived the revolution, for that matter. Little is mentioned of the pond where the aging researcher would swim every morning, or the banya where he’d invite guests for a good sweat, or about the beloved bicycle he bought in Sweden before Lenin’s revolution. In fact, they might not even think about the man at all – a strange fate for a scientist whose name appears in high school textbooks the world over. When foreigners think of Ivan Pavlov, they’re more likely to think of his experiments with dogs than the parks he cultivated. My guide, Irina Aktuganova, continues that not many would know that the wooden buildings scattered through the greenery form part of the region’s UNESCO-protected heritage, an extended monument to Russia’s most famous scientist and first Nobel Laureate: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov. I’m there on a Saturday, and many are taking a stroll with family or friends. Petersburg, are little aware of who planted the trees in the town’s beloved park. I’m told that the denizens of Koltushi, nestled just twenty kilometers outside St.
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