Pavlov's Nobel Prize was for digestion, not for drooling dogs
Ivan Pavlov is famous for classical conditioning, the discovery that dogs could learn to respond to a signal. But the Nobel committee honoured him in 1904 for something else: a decade of work on how digestive glands function. He also told Stalin to his face, in writing, that he was ashamed to be Russian.
Pavlov was born in 1849 in Ryazan, the eldest of ten children of a village Orthodox priest. A bad fall onto stone pavement delayed his schooling until age 11, although he could already read at seven. He entered a theological seminary, but the progressive writings of the critic Dmitry Pisarev and the physiologist Ivan Sechenov drew him out before graduation and into science.
At St Petersburg University his student research on pancreatic nerves won a prize, and in 1883 he completed a doctorate on nerves of the heart. Training in Germany followed; he improved a surgical technique for studying digestion that became known as the Pavlov pouch. After years of rejected applications, he was asked in 1891 to build the physiology department at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, which over 45 years became a world centre of research. His 1897 book on the digestive glands summed up 12 years of work.
His laboratory kept a full kennel because he favoured what he called chronic experiments, keeping animals alive to study normal functions over time, rather than acute procedures that ended in the animal's death. He also revisited the ancient temperaments of Hippocrates and Galen, recasting them in terms of the strength, mobility and balance of nervous processes. He was nominated for the Nobel four years running from 1901 before winning.
The Soviet state funded and honoured him, and Lenin praised him, yet he openly despised communism. In 1923 he said he would not sacrifice a frog's hind leg for the regime's social experiment, and after Sergei Kirov's murder in 1934 he wrote to Molotov protesting persecutions. He softened near the end. Dying of pneumonia in 1936, he asked a student to record his sensations as evidence of the final phase of life.
Source: Ivan Pavlov
