Ivan Pavlov: Exploring the Animal Machine (Oxford Portraits in Science)

113 Pages·2000·1.03 MB·English

by  Daniel Todes

Ivan Pavlov
Exploring the Animal Machine
Image Not Available
Owen Gingerich
General Editor
Ivan Pavlov
Exploring the Animal Machine
Daniel Todes
Oxford University Press
For Sarah, with all my love
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2000 by Daniel Todes
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Design: Design Oasis
Layout: Greg Wozney
Picture research: Amla Sanguu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Todes, Daniel Philip
Ivan Pavlov: exploring the animal machine / by Daniel Todes.
p. cm. -- (Oxford portraits in science)
Includes bibliographic references and index.
Summary: A biography of the Russian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize for
Medicine in 1904 for research on the digestive system and is perhaps best known
for his research on dogs.
ISBN 0-19-510514-1 (trade: alk. paper)
1. Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 1849-1936. 2. Physiologists--Russia (Federation)--
Biography--Juvenile literature. [1. Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich, 1849-1936.
2. Physiologists.] I. Title. II. Series.
QP26.P35 T63 2000
150.19’44’092--dc21
[B] 00-024982
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Frontispiece: Pavlov stands in front of the monument at the Institute of Experimental
Medicine honoring dogs’ service to physiology.
Cover: Pavlov in 1904. Inset:Pavlov with an experimental dog in Sergei Botkin’s laboratory.
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Chapter 1: The Seminarian Chooses Science . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Sidebar:Russian Names and the Pavlov Family . . . . . . . . .13
Sidebar:Sechenov, Reflexes, and Free Will . . . . . . . . . . . .20
Chapter 2: Struggling Scientist in St. Petersburg . . . . . . . . . .24
Chapter 3: Pavlov's Physiology Factory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45
Sidebar:The Pavlov Isolated Stomach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54
Sidebar: Why a Factory? Metaphors in
Scientific Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60
Chapter 4: Towers of Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67
Chapter 5: After the Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80
Chapter 6: “The Prince of World Physiology” . . . . . . . . . . . .97
Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .103
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105
Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .107
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109
Charles Babbage
Alexander Graham Bell
Nicolaus Copernicus
Francis Crick
& James Watson
Marie Curie
Charles Darwin
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein
Michael Faraday
Enrico Fermi
Benjamin Franklin
Sigmund Freud
Galileo Galilei
William Harvey
Joseph Henry
Edward Jenner
Johannes Kepler
Othniel Charles Marsh
& Edward Drinker Cope
Gregor Mendel
Margaret Mead
Isaac Newton
Louis Pasteur
Linus Pauling
Ivan Pavlov
Introduction
When he was 80 years old, Ivan Pavlov plucked an old
book off the library shelf, opened it immediately to page
230, and displayed it sentimentally to a friend. The book
was George Lewes’s The Physiology of Common Life, and the
page showed a diagram of an animal’s internal organs.
“When in my very young days I read this book in a Russian
translation,” Pavlov recalled, “I was greatly intrigued by this
picture. I asked myself: How does such a complicated sys-
tem work?”
“How does such a complicated system work?” That
was the question that Ivan Pavlov asked about animals,
including humans, throughout his life. How does the heart
work, how does the digestive system work, and, finally, how
does the brain work? For Pavlov, animals were wonderful
and infinitely complex machines that somehow worked
precisely as they must in order to survive. The heart sur-
passed any artificial machine in its ability to pump blood
(even regulating its own speed and force) for decades without
resting, the stomach adjusted to pour just the right combi-
nation of gastric juices on any meal so it could be efficiently
digested, and the brain somehow turned the sight of a
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Ivan Pavlov
moving bush into knowledge that an enemy or a potential
meal was near.
For Pavlov, these were endlessly fascinating questions—
and he loved nothing more than to work on them in his
laboratory—but they were also much more than that: the
answers would change human history and human nature
itself. Knowledge, he believed, was power—and scientific
knowledge was the truest and greatest power of all. By fos-
tering an understanding of nature, science would teach
G. H. Lewes’s sketch of
the internal organs of a
mammal, from his The
Physiology of Common
Life.Intrigued by this
drawing as a teenager in
the 1860s, Pavlov still
remembered it clearly
more than 60 years
later.
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8
Introduction
humans how to control it; science also would grant humans
an unprecedented control over their own lives by giving
them a deeper understanding of human nature itself. He put
it this way in 1922, after the terrible devastation of World
War I: “Only science, exact science about human nature
itself, and the most sincere approach to it by the aid of the
all-powerful scientific method, will deliver man from his
present gloom, and will purge him from his contemporary
shame in the sphere of interhuman relations.”
Decades after his death, Pavlov remains one of the best-
known scientists of the 20th century. For scientists, his pio-
neering research on digestion, the brain, and behavior still
provide important insights and an inspiring example of
imaginative experimental techniques. Yet the familiarity of
people around the world with Pavlov and his salivating dogs
testifies to the broader power of his vision: he has come to
symbolize the hope (and for some, the fear) that experimen-
tal science might enable us to understand, and perhaps even
to control, human nature.
Ivan Pavlov’s life, then, is the story of a visionary, a bril-
liant experimental scientist, and a believer in the power of
science to change our world—and ourselves—for the better.
It is the story of a long life devoted almost entirely to this
single vision. This story begins most improbably: A teenage
boy who is studying to be a priest rises early from bed.
Glancing about nervously, he walks through the cold dark
Russian morning to the new public library. The library is
closed, of course—after all, it is five o’clock in the morn-
ing—but Ivan has devised a way to sneak in and read some
forbidden books.
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