The Biography of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the “patriarch of Physiology,” whose groundbreaking experiments on classical conditioning formed the basis of modern behavioral science, was born in Ryazan, Russia on  September 14th, 1849.  Ivan was expected to become a Russian Orthodox priest, as had the previous six generations of Pavlov men. At the age of 20, he announced to his father that he would not be finishing his theological studies, but instead would move to St. Petersburg, to study physiology at the prestigious Saint Petersburg University. In 1890, after years of graduate and medical schooling, Pavlov, began work in a large lab, studying the nervous and digestive systems of dogs. He theorized that it was the nervous system that controlled digestion. He pioneered chronic experiments, where, instead of killing the animals and analyzing their organs, the dogs were surgically altered but kept alive for long periods of time. This type of experimentation on living animals was crucial for his experiments, which were designed to reveal how the animals’ digestive systems responded to food. In 1904, the already world-renowned Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for his discoveries and experiments on the digestive system.  During his acceptance speech, Pavlov stunned the crowd by introducing them to his almost accidental discovery that animals could be trained to respond consistently to a neutral outside stimulus. This principle, which he would spend the rest of his career studying, came to be called Pavlovian or classical conditioning and is the basis for his reputation as one of the great scientists of the Twentieth Century.  Pavlov’s many years of work on conditioned responses was interrupted in 1917 by the Russian Revolution.  Many scientists like Pavlov who worked in government sponsored labs were put out of a job due to the regime change.  Pavlov, even though he had lost his government sponsored lab, was virulently anti-Bolshevik, openly criticizing the government.  Despite the scientists protests, he famously walked out of a meeting with Lenin at government headquarters saying, “I shall never set my foot in this building again,” the Russian government had such great pride in having one of the worlds most renowned scientists that Lenin himself promoted the scientist’s work, provided him state-of-the-art equipment, ensured the publication of his works, and endowed him with large research grants. The Soviet government even built him a scientific village outside of Leningrad in a town called Koltushi to continue his research on conditioning.  Lenin was also one of the earliest leaders to grasp the political implications of Pavlov’s work on conditioned responses. Pavlov’s criticisms of the government while he was receiving large sums of money earned him the nickname, “the only free man in Russia.” Ivan Pavlov died on February 27, 1936 at the age of 86, as one of the most respected men in  Russia and the most renowned physiologist in the world. As the New York Times wrote in his obituary, "To say that Pavlov is the leader in research on conditioned reflexes...is to indicate but superficially his services to thought and science."