The activity of the outstanding histologist academician A.A. Zavarzin as the commissioner of the tomsk group of laboratories of the Institute of Experimental Medicine in the period of the Great Patriotic War

Abstract

Academician A.A. Zavarzin (18861945) the founder of evolutionary histology and the creator of tissue parallelism theory, is known as an outstanding neurohistologist and organizer of the Department of General Morphology of the All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (AIEM). During the Great Patriotic War (World War II) A.A. Zavarzin was evacuated to Tomsk as part of the laboratories of the central part of AIEM (Moscow) and the Leningrad branch of AIEM (Leningrad). Some information about his scientific work in Tomsk is presented in the historical literature, however, up to the present, his organizational activities as a commissioner have not been known. Based on information from the archive of the Institute of Experimental Medicine (St. Petersburg), including previously unpublished materials from orders on personnel for 1941 and 1945 and those for the Tomsk Group of AIEM, this article presents new facts about the life and scientific and organizational activities of Academician A.A. Zavarzin during the Great Patriotic War. In the period from 1943 to 1944, he headed the Tomsk group of laboratories of the A.M. Gorky All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine the main scientific medical institution in the country, on the basis of which the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences was organized in 1945.