Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science by Daniel P. Todes (review)

This is the long-awaited, magisterial biography that culminates twenty-five years of painstaking work on Pavlov’s science by one of history of biology’s foremost scholars. At 730 pages of text and an additional 125 pages of scholarly apparatus, this will stand as the definitive work on Pavlov for decades to come. From the very first page, Todes tells us surprising things: that in America, the idea of “conditioned reflexes”—that is, by ringing a bell Pavlov got dogs to salivate and this was his most important contribution—is mistaken in almost all respects. A July 14, 1923, New York Times article about Pavlov’s visit to America mistranslated his “conditional reflexes.” The writer misinterpreted Pavlov’s experiments to believe they supported behaviorism, popular in the United States at that time, notwithstanding that Pavlov felt his work profoundly opposed behaviorism. Indeed, his early work on digestive glands, we learn, became more important after 1897–98 as a springboard in Pavlov’s ambitious attempt to understand the psyche by a far less reductionist approach. This approach even took seriously Freud’s theory of the neuroses (pp. 498–500) and experimentally validated it by producing neuroses in dogs in the laboratory. The real Pavlov is far more interesting than the simplistic version most Americans think they know.

Todes paints a convincing portrait of the young physiologist in a newly liberalizing Russia. He weaves in the most important findings of his own earlier book, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory, in chapters 11, 12, 14, 17, and 18. Chapter 17, about Pavlov’s move from studying nervous control of digestion to expand his focus to “targeting the psyche” as a whole, is substantially revised; as noted above, this is a major theme of the biography. But Todes’s analysis of how Pavlov created his “physiology factory” still seems as fertile as when he introduced the metaphor more than fifteen years ago, playing on Pavlov’s own metaphor of the digestive system as a complex chemical factory. The author describes (p. 186) how the factory metaphor, for Pavlov, motivated and inspired a particular set of research questions. It is interesting to compare for example with Robert Kohler’s metaphor of Drosophila in the hands of the Morgan school as a “breeder reactor” for data, Ph.D.s, professorships, and so on. (Note the shift in metaphors to keep up with the cultural changes in perception of technology.) Drosophila, by contrast, could be a factory for Ph.D.s in many labs, a much more transportable experimental system spreading more rapidly than Pavlov’s dogs.

One occasionally gets the feeling authors get carried away with semiotic analysis, or a notion about metaphor. Todes, however, by very close analysis of primary sources—the dissertations written by students in Pavlov’s lab, and others—makes the reader so clear about the actual experimental evidence that we have full confidence he understands both the enabling and guiding power of the metaphor for Pavlov, but also the limits the experimental data placed upon the metaphor. On pages 202 to 205, for example, Todes convincingly reconstructs a plausible scenario for Pavlov’s intellectual integrity in balancing his preconceived model with his admission that he’s presenting only some of the data, that which he judges most “stereotypical” of the process under study.

Todes also reveals Pavlov’s talent in building relationships with patrons—so much so that he moves skillfully from cultivating the patronage of Prince Ol’denburgskii under the Czarist regime, to later negotiating new relationships with the Bolshevik regime, despite his political opposition to Bolshevism. Pavlov (p. 484) welcomed the Bolsheviks’ operative Lev Federov into the bosom of his lab, then won his personal loyalty and put his scientific talent to maximum use— thus partially “flipping” Federov to become his representative to the Bolshevik government, not merely their agent in his lab. Federov was equally clever, convincing Pavlov of a new dialectical materialist...