At first, I took the information on this topic in approximately the same way as the result of our exposure of the SOVIET BIOROBOT.
In 1925 Bulgakov writes "Heart of a Dog". The fate of the story was decided already at the first reading of the manuscript in the circle of writers - an OGPU agent was present there, who wrote a detailed review-denunciation. The work was branded as counter-revolutionary and banned. After the long-awaited publication of "Heart of a Dog" in the Soviet Union in 1987, the sympathies of readers and viewers were entirely on the side of Professor Preobrazhensky.
What does the professor do? Performs surgery to transplant the gonads of monkeys to humans. For what? How fantastic it will sound - yes, for rejuvenation! Few people know that the prototype of Professor Preobrazhensky was the Russian émigré doctor Sergei Voronov.
All the newspapers trumpeted his experiments in those years. But first, let's look even further into history …
In 1817, an amazing child was born to an American-French family in the British colony on the island of Mauritius. Even his name and surname were double, Franco-Saxon: Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard. You could put a comma separated: citizen of the world.
His father, a sailor, once did not return from the voyage, and his mother raised her son alone. Charles Edouard adopted mainly French culture, although he spoke with a noticeable English accent until the end of his days. As a young man, he went to Paris to study as a doctor. Subsequently, he traveled a lot around the world, worked in different countries, but it was France that remained his alma mater, and then the birthplace of his glory.
In 1846, the young doctor returned to the island of Mauritius. It was at this time that a cholera epidemic broke out on the island, and Brown-Sekar fought selflessly for the lives of the sick. Already in these years, he combined medical practice with scientific research.
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Then he went to his father's homeland, to the United States, worked in leading hospitals, taught at Harvard University. A few years later, Brown-Sekar moved to London, where he worked for several years in a hospital for paralytics and epileptics. And everywhere he conducted deep research, wrote scientific works that enriched medical science. Often, the scientist performed experiments on himself, although in his published works he referred to anonymous patients.
He was already in his fifties when he received French citizenship and has not left France since then. In 1869 he became a professor at the Faculty of Medicine, and ten years later he headed the Faculty of Experimental Physiology at the College de France. It was there that his bold experiments on the transplantation of animal tissues and organs took place. In 1886, Brown-Séquard was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
By the age of seventy, the professor felt a noticeable decrease in mental and physical activity. And there is still so much work ahead, so many plans!.. He remembered that in animals the peak of activity coincides with the period of puberty. This observation served as the impetus for a new series of experiments. Moreover, the scientist himself acted as a "guinea pig". He made an infusion from tissues taken from the testicles of young dogs and guinea pigs; the scientist injected this liquid under his skin. The injections were extremely painful. But then the pain subsided, and the old man professor felt that his former strength, sharpness of mind was gradually returning to him, and his sexual tone was also increasing.
On June 1, 1889, Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard made a lecture at the Biological Society. It was a scientific sensation! The professor informed his colleagues about the results obtained: he gave specific data on an increase in muscle mass, an improvement in the functioning of the rectum and genitourinary system, and brain activity. The colleagues gave a standing ovation to the scientist.
The report was soon published as a brochure and became widely known. The aging rich and celebrities, especially women, filled the professor with pleas: give us back our youth! In order to financially support further research, Brown-Séquard began selling an injectable extract under the name Sekardin. The public immediately dubbed the drug "the elixir of youth."
In the midst of the excitement around "Sekardin" its creator was horrified to feel that his condition was deteriorating, a complete breakdown, mental and sexual activity sets in. The aging process accelerated, the luminary of medicine rolled back and died out after five years.
Already during his lifetime, the name of Brown-Sekar was overgrown with legends. It was said that during a cholera epidemic, he ate the feces of infected patients in order to experience the symptoms of the onset of the disease; that he injected fresh blood into the severed head of an executed criminal in an attempt to revive it; that he transplanted a second head to the dog, grafted a cat's tail into a rooster … It is not surprising that the image of this scientist-experimenter was reflected in contemporary literature. For example, the poet and writer Villiers de Lisle-Adan portrayed Brown-Séquard in a novel from the Strange Stories series.
Subsequently, scientists found that the substance extracted by Brown-Séquard from the testicles of animals did not affect the hormonal activity of the human body. And the initial effect experienced by the old man professor and some patients was due to psychological causes, the so-called placebo.
Despite this delusion of Brown-Séquard (how many of them the history of science knows!), Physicians highly appreciated his works. And for some colleagues, the embarrassment with the "elixir of youth" did not look like a defeat, but as a tempting direction for further research. Our compatriot, who became a famous French surgeon, turned out to be such a successor.
In Europe he was known by the name Serge Voronoff. Sergey Voronov, or rather, Samuil Abramovich Voronov, was born in July 1866 in a village near Voronezh. He graduated from a real school, where, unlike gymnasiums, Jews were allowed, and at the age of 18 he left for France to continue his education.
After studying at the Sorbonne and the Higher Medical School, in 1907, Sergei Voronov naturalized, having received a French passport. The Russian student was a favorite student of the French surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, who in 1912 won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, from whom he acquired knowledge on the technique of surgical organ transplantation.
Then, for fourteen years, Voronov went to Egypt, where he made a remarkable career, becoming a surgeon and physician in the Khedive court. He made a great contribution to the formation of the health care system in this country: he opened an infectious diseases hospital, created a school of nursing and founded the Egyptian Medical Journal. It was in Egypt in 1898 that Voronov first closely examined an interesting medical phenomenon for him - the Khedive eunuchs. He was surprised to learn that boys are castrated at 6-7 years old, long before the body stops growing and developing. Observations of castrates prompted Voronov to think about the importance of glands of sexual secretion: men who were deprived of them were often sick, differed in their imperfect skeletal structure, obesity, and even their ability to think was affected: eunuchs were poorly given to memorize verses from the Koran. These unfortunate people showed signs of old people early: gray hair, clouding of the cornea, and they died earlier.
But what if the secret of vigor and longevity is hidden in the sex glands? So Voronov came up with the idea to spur the aging body by transplanting the seminal glands. For a long time he experimented with animals: he transplanted the glands of the young to old goats, sheep and bulls, they began to jump and mate again. His path to the practice of rejuvenation was slowed down by the First World War: Voronov became the chief surgeon of the Russian military hospital in Paris. There he also treated the wounded, using the bones of monkeys to create orthopedic prostheses for soldiers.
Returning to Paris, Voronov began a series of experiments on the transplantation of animal tissue to sick people. He transplanted slices of chimpanzee glands into patients with thyroid diseases. The operations had a noticeable effect. This method has proven to be effective in the treatment of dementia. The name of Sergei Voronov thundered in Russia as well.
The illustrated weekly Iskra wrote in 1914:
“Sensational discovery. At the French Medical Academy, our compatriot, Dr. Sergei Voronov, made a sensational report about the operation he performed in his clinic on a 14-year-old idiot boy. From the age of six, the mental development of this boy stopped, and all the signs of abnormality and cretinism were clearly indicated: an extinct look, dullness and a lack of understanding of the most ordinary things. Voronov inoculated this boy with a monkey's thymus gland. The success exceeded expectations. The boy's eyes revived, mental abilities, intelligence, curiosity appeared. Dr. Voronov is a former employee of Carrel."
At the beginning of the 20th century, biological knowledge moved forward with giant strides. Karl Landsteiner, Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, singled out blood groups. Alexis Carrel opened the door to organ transplant surgery. But an enormous distance separated that medical era from the ethical principles of our time - doctors were not afraid of anything, the most daring interventions in the human body seemed to them to be ordinary steps on the way to a brilliant future.
On the poster: “Serge Voronoff. Testicular transplant from monkey to human. Retired Colonel, veteran of the Indian Campaign in great shape after surgery"
Voronov could only use the scientific discoveries of his contemporaries, combining them with a brilliant mastery of practical surgery. In 1920, Dr. Voronov performed the first operation on a man, implanting a monkey's thyroid gland in him, and then switched to a sex gland transplant. From a technical point of view, the operations were carried out as follows: the surgeon did not replace one organ with another, but added to the human testicles a thin "cut" of the drug, which took root (as it was then believed) in the recipient's body and began to produce sex hormones. Rather, it could be called a "grafting" of monkey energy.
Interestingly, at first he ran an advertising campaign in France in favor of donation, but he never found volunteers willing to part with their sex glands. Potential candidates either asked for an incredible price, or stood at such a low level of the social ladder that the proposed material was already worthless … It was decided to take spare parts from large primate monkeys. “Will a monkey surpass a person in the quality of its organs, a stronger physical shell, less susceptible to bad heredity: gout, alcoholism, syphilis? I don’t know, but I can argue that with thyroid and testicular transplants, monkey organs gave better results than human organs,”wrote Dr. Voronov in his work“Research on old age and rejuvenation by the method of transplantation”.
Doctor and his assistant with a monkey on the operating table.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Sergei Voronov served as director of the Laboratory for Experimental Surgery at the Collège de France. The era of his surgical triumph fell on these years. He transplanted thyroid and sex glands and ovaries to his patients: about 500 operations in France, as well as an uncountable number of them in a clinic in Algeria. He also operated in the United States, where the New York Times covered the details of his surgical procedures in front page reports. Now it is not possible to find which of the Swiss clinics Voronov collaborated with, most likely he had practice here as well. His patients were entrepreneurs, politicians, artists from 65 to 85 years old. Transplants cost a lot of money, Voronov became fabulously rich.
Soon, 45 surgeons and professors were working on the "Voronov method" all over the world. Doctors organized expeditions to Africa for monkeys, and some of them sincerely regretted that organs should not be taken from those sentenced to death. At the same time with Voronov, another famous surgeon, Paul Niehans (1882-1971), practiced in Switzerland. In his elite clinic in Montreux, he pioneered cell therapy - his method of rejuvenation was based on the introduction of embryonic cells into the patient's body, also obtained from the gonads.
At the same time, Voronov conducted experiments on rejuvenation on animals - sheep, goats and bulls. He transplanted thin sections from the testicles of young individuals into the scrotum of old animals, as a result, they acquired the energy and agility of young animals. Finally it was the turn of the monkeys and humans. They say that Voronov made the first transplants for people for millionaires, and he took testicles from executed criminals. Obviously, this "material" was limited, so chimpanzees and baboons became the main "donors". The first officially recorded operation to transplant the glands of a monkey to a person took place on June 12, 1920. And three years later, Sergei Voronov made a sensational speech at the international congress of surgeons in London. Seven hundred colleagues applauded Voronov's successes. His published works, such as "Rejuvenation by grafting", became widely known throughout the world,including in Soviet Russia.
Dr. Voronov's unique method made him the richest physician in the world. Operations in his clinics in France and Algeria were put on stream. Millionaires, politicians, stage and screen stars became his clients. To meet the growing demand for transplants, he had to start his own monkey nursery.
Voronov himself led the life of a rich man and a star: he rented the first floor of a first-class hotel, kept two mistresses, a large staff of servants, secretaries, security guards and chauffeurs. However, his legal wives did not complain about the lack of attention from their spouse, but the first two died one after the other, only the third survived her husband.
A brilliant writer, Voronov produced several books that became bestsellers in the 1920s. Thus, in his work "Rejuvenation by grafting", he says that operations increase sexual desire, memory, hearing, vision and incredibly increase efficiency. But it would be vulgar to say that Dr. Voronov was only interested in the continuation of a person's sexual function. He dreamed - no more, no less - to give a person eternal youth and conquer death.
“Death revolts a person as the greatest of injustices, because he keeps intimate memories of his own immortality,” Voronov wrote in his book “To Live. An Investigation into Ways to Awaken Life Energy and Increase Life Expectancy”, published in Paris in 1920. “Each cell that makes up the body, and which at first was single and independent, recalls its endless and eternal life and screams in horror at its own death from its connection with other dying cells … Over billions of years, cells have united, forming increasingly complex structures, from the simplest organism of amoeba to the summit of creation - man, and this harmonious union is often violated, which leads to a terrible immoral phenomenon - death."
Voronov's method of rejuvenation inspired writers. Under the pen of Mikhail Bulgakov, he turned into Professor Preobrazhensky from the story "Heart of a Dog". As we remember, the creator of Sharikov not only gave the human pituitary gland to the dog, but also earned a living, returning the potency to the old and depraved enemies of the revolution. And Conan Doyle brought out the Russian doctor in the story about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes "Man on all fours."
Around 1925, a new inhabitant of the Côte d'Azur caused a lot of noise - Sergei Voronov bought the Grimaldi Castle, a vast estate on the Italian side, located a hundred meters from Menton. A French surgeon with a Russian name equipped there a laboratory and a nursery for breeding monkeys in his own garden. Chimpanzees, orangutans and baboons trapped in metal cages behaved uneasily: they seemed to never doubt what awaited them … They say that their owner was not limited to transplanting monkey glands to men, but also engaged in the reproductive function of women. He transplanted eggs into women after menopause, and then his imagination went even further, to transplanting a female egg into a monkey and trying to fertilize it with human sperm. These works more and more alienated him from Faust, closer to Frankenstein.
Grimaldi Palace.
It is clear that Voronov took his experiments seriously. But practice has shown that, although testicular transplantation could stimulate sexual activity and libido for some time, it did not restore worn out heart, blood vessels and other organs necessary for vital activity.
… In the Grimaldi Palace, nicknamed the Voronov Palace, Sergei's brother, Alexander Voronov, lived all year round, and managed the estate. He died at Auschwitz during World War II. In 1940, the Nazis confiscated all the equipment of Voronov's laboratory, all his archives and documents located in the palace on the Cote d'Azur. The doctor himself lived in New York during the war with his third wife. And after the liberation of France, he returned, having found complete devastation and several starving monkeys at his home.
However, at that time Voronov was no longer a substitute. The crown of the wonder surgeon fell from his head a few years after the start of the first experiments on transplantation of the sex glands. The English lord, one of his most "successful" patients, rejuvenated after being vaccinated with monkey hormones, died of his own intemperance two years after the operation. And the rest of the patients also turned out to be not among the centenarians. Perhaps their euphoric state in the first months after Dr. Voronov's scalpel was due to the placebo effect (here's more about the Placebo Effect)?
Gertie, the third wife of the surgeon, was 49 years his junior.
Everything has changed. Those who applauded Voronov now laughed at him. The doctor took the criticism hard. He spent several years in depression, and then went headlong into the pleasures for which his patients so yearned - in endless parties, travel and love affairs. I got married for the third time. The third wife of a native of a village near Voronezh, the brilliant beauty Gerti, or Gertrude, was 49 years younger than him - an Austrian subject, Romanian by birth, a cousin of the official mistress of the Romanian king Karol Magda Lupezco. (Voronov's first wife, Margarit Barb, was a poet, a fan of the Rosicrucian Order, the marriage ended in divorce. The second, the daughter of an American oil millionaire, Evelyn Bostwick, passionately fell in love with Voronov, became his devoted assistant. To marry him, she divorced Count Perigny,But she died of cancer three years after the wedding, in 1921.) Gertie lived with Voronov for 15 years, until his death.
The glory of Voronov was a little "greasy", as the French say. The doctor did not hide that his operations lead, among other things, to violent sexual activity, hence the unhealthy excitement around his activities. Testicle manipulation has become the topic of many anecdotes and pop couplets in the Old and New Worlds. In France during these years, an ashtray, decorated with a statuette of a monkey covering the genitals with its paws, and the inscription: "No, Voronoff, you won't take me!" On the other hand, thoughtful authors expressed concerns - after all, no one knew what consequences awaited Voronov's patients in the future and what their offspring would be.
Book: * From cretin to genius *.
In fact, the effect of Voronov's operations, as well as of Brown-Séquard injections, was short-lived. Subsequently, scientists have established that the substance contained in the testicles is testosterone, it has only a temporary effect on the human body. The scientific community turned its back on Voronov, the newspapers that glorified his experiments now mocked him. They used to blame him, for example, already in the 1990s, it was suggested that it was he who introduced the AIDS virus to humans during his operations. Only recently has medicine again recognized Voronov's merits in the fight against old age.
Voronov died on September 3, 1951, at the age of 85, in Lausanne. The death of the professor is shrouded in mystery. It is known that in a Swiss city on the lake he was being treated for the consequences of a fall - Voronov broke his leg. He had chest pains. Presumably, the cause of his death was pneumonia or a blood clot that moved from the leg to the heart. "Voronov must have died from the effects of syphilis, which he contracted during one of the transplants," the ill-wishers gloated. It is believed that the surgeon's ashes were transported to Nice and buried in the Cocade Russian cemetery. However, during the research of the cemetery and its archives, no such burial was found. There is no grave in both Menton cemeteries. “No one knows whether his body rests in Menton, or if he was cremated in Switzerland,” writes the Swiss researcher J. J. Naw
Two years later, the inconsolable widow remarried to the Portuguese prince Da Foz. The wedding ceremony was led by the Bishop of Monaco. “The bride was very elegant in a dress of blue-gray lace and a hat with a feather of the same shade and a magnificent mink cape covering her shoulders,” wrote the newspaper Nice Matin on November 1, 1953.
And transplant surgery has taken it one step further. A year later, the world premiere was held - a kidney transplant from a living donor, an identical twin brother. In the 1960s, the recipient mortality rate during such operations reached 81% when a kidney was taken from a deceased person, and 52% if the donor was alive.
It is interesting that Voronov, the creator of such directions in medicine as cell therapy or the hormonal theory of aging, was not alone in the desire to study the action of sex hormones, and in the conjecture that they could be used for rejuvenation. At the same time, chemists and pharmacists approached the problem from the other side. So, they are actively interested in testosterone: the effect of this hormone on the body and the methods of its synthesis.
The first to do this was on May 27, 1935, professor of pharmacology from Amsterdam Ernst Lacker. He received a hormone, which he assigned the name "testosterone", having processed a huge number of testes of bulls, and released a work "On the male hormone in crystalline form obtained from the testes."
Also in 1935, German chemist Adolf Butenandt invented a formula for chemically producing testosterone. He worked for the Schering pharmaceutical company in Berlin, which managed to survive the First World War without compromising production. In 1923, the company made huge profits thanks to inflation, and spent some of the income collecting 25,000 liters of urine from the police - enough to fill an Olympic pool. From it, the patient Butenandt extracted 15 milligrams of a relatively inactive breakdown product of testosterone, which he called androsterone. He quickly came to the conclusion that this method of producing the hormone was too laborious (and unpleasant), so he invented an easier method, which is still relevant today. The chemist methodically deduced the structure of the hormone and then produced it from cholesterol, as the body itself does. On August 24, 1935, he submitted a description of this process and a sample of the product to a German chemical journal.
Sometimes great discoveries are made in parallel. A week later, Leopolda Ruzicka, a Croat chemist who worked for the pharmaceutical company Ciba (the predecessor of Novartis) in Zurich, announced that he had received a patent for a method for producing testosterone from cholesterol. For this, both researchers, Ruzicka and Butenandt, received the Nobel Prize in 1939.
In 1940, the Nazis occupied France, and the Vichy subordinate to them confiscated all the equipment of Voronov's laboratory, all his archives and documents that were in his palace on the French Riviera. He also had to flee from Algeria to neutral Switzerland. There, the local authorities categorically forbade him to engage in "rejuvenation", and until the end of his days - in 1951 - Voronov was an ordinary pensioner. He lived for 85 years.
In the USSR, the main enthusiast of these practitioners was Doctor Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (died in 1932).
It was the experiments of Ilya Ivanov that became fiction in the USSR, overgrown with speculation every year. Ivanov allegedly deduced a "hybrid man" - a half-man-half-monkey.
In 1999, Voronov's name was again on the radar: the press speculated that the virus of the immunodeficiency syndrome, discovered in the 1980s, was "delivered" to humanity by him. During his transplants, Voronov allegedly carried AIDS from monkeys to patients. True, the following years have spared his reputation, and the reprint of books even improved it. In 2008, his book "From a cretin to a genius" was published in Russian. In it, the scientist shows himself to be a talented storyteller, talking about heredity, and quite realistic explains that thought is the result of a chemical reaction in which the secretion of the thyroid gland plays a decisive role.
Today, Voronov's name is on the list of famous residents of Lausanne, along with the names of the writer Georges Simenon, choreographer Maurice Béjart, jeweler Carl Faberge (read an interview with his granddaughter Tatyana Fedorovna Fabergé) and other prominent figures of the recent era.
So far, the descendants of Voronov from medicine have divided the dream of eternal youth and sexual activity into two parts: external and functional. For the first, cosmetic surgery and numerous rejuvenation techniques were invented. For the second, Viagra. But Voronov's idea of supplying the body with hormones, the production of which decreases with age, is actively used by doctors. Surely, other scientific discoveries await a person along the way.