Serge Voronoff

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Serge Voronoff (1920)

Serge Voronoff ( Russian Сергей Абрамович Воронов , transcribed Sergei Abramowitsch Voronow ; * before July 10, 1866 near Voronezh , Russian Empire as Samuel Voronoff ; † September 3, 1951 in Lausanne , Switzerland ) was a French surgeon of Russian origin and a Pioneer in the field of xenotransplantation .

life and work

Serge Voronoff was born as Samuel Voronoff before July 10, 1866 (the day of his circumcision in a Russian synagogue ). At the age of 18, Voronoff emigrated to France to study medicine in Paris . In 1895 he became a French citizen. The future Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel was one of his teachers and later a friend. From 1896 to 1910 Voronoff worked in Egypt as a personal physician at the court of the Khedives . There he was considered one of the pioneers of modern medicine. Among other things, he studied the eunuchs of the court who were neutered in their childhood. He found out that castration has effects on the skeleton, muscles, nervous system and psychological development beyond the sexual. These studies were to have a strong influence on his later work. When he returned to France in 1910, Voronoff dealt with transplants, modeled on Carrels. First he transplanted ovaries and thyroid glands , and during World War I he also performed bone transplants . Voronoff was very wealthy and founded his own research laboratory at the renowned Collège de France , which he financed like his other research institutions. He began to specialize in testicle transplants . Voronoff was impressed by the success of the thyroid transplants and wanted to achieve "non-specific revitalization" with testicular transplants.

Voronoff performed over five hundred testicular transplants in sheep , goats and bulls . He transferred the testicles from young animals to old animals. He found that the vitality of the old animals increased. In the 1920s he then worked with monkey testicle implants. Encouraged by the results of "rejuvenation" in various species, he implanted sliced ​​testicles of a chimpanzee for the first time in a patient's scrotum on June 12, 1920 . The thin disks should promote the union of the xenograft with the patient's tissue. In 1926 he published the book The Study of Old Age and my Method of Rejuvenation about his transplants and the (supposed) successes they achieved . Voronoff performed over 500 transplants by the 1930s. Worldwide - particularly in the United States , the Soviet Union , Brazil , Chile and India - the number of these interventions ran into the thousands. The demand for chimpanzees and baboons , whose testes were used for the transplants, could hardly be met at times. In England, where vivisection was strictly forbidden at the time , the testicles were transplanted from corpses . In Austria, Eugen Steinach worked on a variant of Voronoff's transplants. Voronoff built a special monkey house in Menton . He later also transplanted monkey ovaries (unsuccessfully) to women to prevent menopause . At the 1923 International Congress of Surgeons in London with over 700 participants, Voronoff's work on “rejuvenating old men” was recognized. When the effects promised by Voronoff did not materialize in the patients - the short-term successes observed today are essentially attributed to the placebo effect - Voronoff's transplant method fell out of fashion and largely forgotten. When testosterone was identified as the active substance of the testes a few years later , hopes for the revitalization and rejuvenation of the man sprang up again. Voronoff insisted that the discovery of testosterone would confirm his theories. The hoped-for effect did not materialize. Testosterone did not increase the life expectancy of the test animals. Due to the pleiotropic effect of testosterone, the opposite is more the case.

Voronoff demanded the sum of 100,000 gold francs per intervention.

Fonts (selection)

  • Essai sur les trèves morbides. Paris 1893 (dissertation, University of Paris, 1893/94).
  • Quarante-trois Greffes du Singe à l'Homme. G. Doin, Paris 1924.
  • La Greffe animale, un nouveau facteur d'économie sociale. CA Vomhoff, Strasbourg 1924.
    • Organ overplanting and their practical use in the domestic animal. Translated from the French by Gerhard Golm. Preface: Richard Mühsam. Dr. Werner Klinkhardt, Leipzig 1925.
  • Étude sur la vieillesse et le rajeunissement par la greffe. G. Doin, Paris 1926.
    • Preventing aging through artificial rejuvenation: transplantation of the sex glands from monkeys to humans . Translated from the French by Zoltán by Nemes Nagy. Eigenbrödler, Berlin 1926.
  • La conquête de la vie. E. Fasquelle, Paris 1928.
    • Conquering life. The problem of rejuvenation. Julius Hoffmann Verlag, Stuttgart 1928.
  • With George Alexandrescu: La greffe testiculaire du singe à l'homme: technique opératoire, manifestations physiologiques, évolution histologique, statistique. G. Doin, Paris 1930
    • Testicular transplant from monkey to human: surgical technique, physiological phenomena, historical development, statistics. Translated from the French by Maurice-Michel Grinbaum. Eigenbrödler, Berlin / Zurich 1930.
  • With George Alexandrescu: The Transmission of Human Cancer to Monkeys. Experimental research. In: Wiener medical Wochenschrift . 1932, pp. 35-37.
  • Les sources de la vie. Fasquelle, Paris 1933.
    • The sources of life (= Harvard College Library history of science project. Vol. 202). Humphries, Boston 1943.

literature

  • Rudolf Kafemann: Is rejuvenation possible in men and women or: Truth, error and deception in the question of rejuvenation. Inhyg & Co., Koenigsberg 1928.
  • Alain Lellouch, Alain Segal: Contribution à l'histoire de la gérontologie et de l'endocrinologie du début du XXème siècle: le Docteur Voronoff (1866-1951) et ses essais de rajeunissement par les greffes animales. In: Histoire des Sciences médicales. Vol. 35 (2001), H. 4, pp. 425-434 ( online ), PMID 11917919 .
  • A. New: Steinach effect according to Neosexetten. About the rejuvenation methods of Prof. Steinach, Voronoff and Scheuer. The effect on general symptoms of old age, loss of strength and abnormal blood pressure. In: Deutsche Aerzte-Zeitung. Vol. 4 (1929), No. 169.
  • Jean Réal: Voronoff. Biography. Stock, Paris 2001, ISBN 978-2-234-05336-6 .
  • Thomas Schlich: The Invention of Organ Transplantation. Success and failure of surgical organ replacement (1880–1930). Campus, Frankfurt am Main / New York 1998, ISBN 3-593-35940-5 , p. 163.
  • D. Schultheiss, J. Denil, U. Jonas: Rejuvenation in the early 20th century. In: Andrologia. Vol. 29 (1997), No. 6, pp. 351-355, doi: 10.1111 / j.1439-0272.1997.tb00329.x , PMID 9430441 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ JY Deschamps et al: History of xenotransplantation. In: Xenotransplantation. Volume 12, 2005, pp. 91-109. PMID 15693840
  2. ^ F. Augier and others: Le Docteur Samuel Serge. Voronoff (1866–1951) ou la queˆ te de l'eīternelle jeunesse. In: Hist Sci Med. Volume 30, 1996, pp. 163-171. PMID 11624870 (German title: Dr. Samuel Serge Voronoff (1866–1951) or "the question of eternal youth". )
  3. ↑ T. Gillyboeuf: The Famous Doctor Who inserts Monkey Glands in Millionaires.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Journal of the EE Cummings Society. 2000, pp. 44-45.@1@ 2Template: dead link / main.gvsu.edu  
  4. ↑ T. Schlich: The Invention of Organ Transplantation. Campus Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-593-35940-5 , p. 163. Restricted preview in the Google book search
  5. ^ S. Voronoff: The study of old age and my method of rejuvenation. The Gill publishing Co. Ltd., London, 1926
  6. ↑ E. Steinach: Rejuvenation through experimental revitalization of the aging pubertal gland. In: Endocrinology. Volume 5, 1921, p. 238. doi : 10.1210 / endo-5-2-238
  7. ↑ T. Gillyboeuf: The Famous Doctor Who inserts Monkey Glands in Millionaires.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: The Journal of the EE Cummings Society. 2000, pp. 44-45.@1@ 2Template: dead link / main.gvsu.edu  
  8. ↑ C. Sengoopta: Rejuvenation and the prolongation of life: science or quackery? In: Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. Volume 37, 1993, p. 55.
  9. ^ Medicine: Voronoff and Steinach. In: Time Magazine, July 30, 1923
  10. ↑ D. Hamilton: The Monkey Gland Affair. Chatto & Windus, London, 1986.
  11. ↑ D. Schultheiss: A Brief History of Testosterone. In: Der Urologe A. Volume 49, pp. 51-55. doi : 10.1007 / s00120-009-2199-6
  12. ↑ C. López-Otín and EP Diamandis: Breast and prostate cancer: an analysis of common epidemiology, genetic and biochemical features. In: Endocr Rev . Volume 19, 1998, pp. 365-396. PMID 9715372 (Review).
  13. ↑ Surgery without a knife. In: Der Spiegel. Volume 13, 1957, pp. 32–41.
personal data
SURNAME Voronoff, Serge
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Воронов, Сергей Абрамович (Russian); Voronow, Sergei Abramowitsch; Voronoff, Samuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian-French surgeon
DATE OF BIRTH before July 10, 1866
PLACE OF BIRTH near Voronezh , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH 3rd September 1951
Place of death Lausanne , Switzerland