Background

Nikolai Amosov was born on December 6, 1913, in Olkhova, a small village near the town of Cherepovets. Nikolai's mother, Elizaveta Kirillovna, was a local midwife. His father, a soldier in the First World War, returned from German captivity in 1919. Later, he left his family for another woman and Amosov never forgave him.

Education

Amosov finished elementary school in his native village.

In 1926, he entered the "second-level" school (Cherepovets middle school #1), and later the Lumber-mechanical technical college in Cherepovets. In 1932, he graduated with a Technician diploma and became a mechanical engineer.

Nikolay Amosov showed interest not only in technology but also in medicine. In 1935, Amosov entered the Arkhangelsk Medical College. There, he met Vadim Evgenievich Lashkarev, a distinguished physicist who introduced Amosov to the "world of parapsychology". In 1939, Amosov graduated from college. He wanted to continue his postgraduate study in physiology but he had to learn surgery at the post-graduate course.

At the same time, he went on with his study by correspondence at the Cherepovets State Industrial Institute. Nikolai chose for his diploma the project of a large airplane with a steam turbine. He spent a lot of time, developing this project and hoped that it would be admitted to production, but it was not. Instead, in 1940 Nikolai Amosov received a diploma in engineering.

Career

From 1932 till 1935, Amosov worked at the Arkhangelsk Power station as a mechanic.

In 1941, Amosov was drafted into the Red Army. He was immediately appointed the head surgeon at a mobile field hospital, where he worked throughout the war on several fronts: Western, Bryansk, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Belorussian fronts, as well as the 1st Far East front (1945).

During the war, Amosov collected enough research material for his Ph.D. thesis “Knee Joint injuries,” which he defended in Gorkiy (today Nizhniy Novgorod) in 1948. He became an experienced surgeon and could deal with all parts of the body. He was especially adept at treating chest and joint wounds, as well as thigh bone fractures.

After the dissolution of the hospital, Amosov and his wife were assigned to another unit in Manchuria to treat typhus-infected Japanese captives. In February 1946, Amosov was appointed as a resident surgeon at a district hospital.

At that time, it was no small feat for a young doctor to leave army service. Thanks to his connections, as well as his engineer diploma, he managed to arrange a transfer to Moscow, where he was assigned to supervise the surgical department at the Sklifosovsky Institute. Much of the equipment at the hospital was broken, which became a real challenge for the engineer. The Amosovs only spent a year in the capital, because they found the work not rewarding enough. The equipment was uninteresting, and opportunities to perform surgery nonexistent, which made working in Moscow unattractive.

Eventually, thanks to L. Bykova, Amosov was offered the position of chief surgeon of Bryansk oblast and the head of the department at the Bryansk regional hospital. Nikolay Anosov kept this position throughout 1947-1952. Here, while studying other branches of surgery, Amosov concentrated on chest surgery, which was poorly researched in the USSR at the time. He became successful in treating surgical and oncological lung, esophagus, and forestomach damage. His surgery results were among the best in the Soviet Union. The surgeon had many good memories of this period in his life: his excellent work and wonderful people, many difficult medical cases and operations. His principal achievement in Bryansk was designing a new method of lung reduction during abscess, cancer, and tuberculosis treatment.

In November 1952, the family moved to Kyiv on a special invitation from A.S. Mamolat, director of the Kyiv Tuberculosis Institute. There, Amosov was supposed to supervise the thoracic surgery department. At first, he hated Kyiv, his one-room apartment, low-grade surgery, having to work in two places at once, a lack of patients, and lazy assistants. He missed Bryansk and even occasionally went back to operate there. However, Amosov adjusted to the new workplace. His wife entered Kyiv Medical Institute, while Amosov himself defended another Doctor’s Thesis on the topic of “Pneumonectomy and lung reduction for tuberculosis treatment”, which was met with approval of A.N. Bakulev, one of the leading Soviet surgeons at the time, and Amosov was elected to be a professor at the Medical Institute.

In 1955, Amosov founded and headed the department of chest surgery for doctor's professional development, first in the Soviet Union, which later also gave birth to the department of anesthesiology. The department brought up hundreds of valuable specialists.

In 1957, Amosov visited a surgeon convention in Mexico which presented a heart surgery using a bypass (CPB) pump. The visit inspired Amosov to create a similar device on his own. Together with his staff, doctor I. Lissov, and design engineers O. Mavrodiy and A. Trubchaninov, he developed a reliable, widely applicable CPB device, which was one of the first to be implemented in medical practice in the USSR.

In 1959, the already famous Amosov founded and headed the biological cybernetics department at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. Under his direction, the department conducted fundamental research on heart autoregulation systems, designed and constructed a physiological model of the human body’s internal milieu, modeled basic psychic functions, and socio-psychological mechanisms of human behavior using computers.

In 1962, Amosov began to write. He was moved by the death of a girl during a surgery. Amosov described the day in order to vent his feelings. When his writer friend Dold-Mikhailyk read the story, he helped Amosov to publish it in a magazine. This later became the beginning of the world-famous novel, “The thoughts and heart.” Later on, Amosov continued to write, releasing a number of books, e.g. "Notes from the Future, "PPG 22-66. The notes of a field surgeon," "The Book of happiness and misery," "Voices of the times," "Thoughts on health”, all of which have been repeatedly published both in the USSR and abroad.

In 1963, Amosov was the first surgeon in the Soviet Union to perform mitral valve replacement; in 1965 he created and implemented the world’s first antithrombotic artificial heart valves. He also invented a series of new surgical treatment methods for cardiac defects, and created several original models of CPB pumps.

Nikolai Amosov was deputy director of the Research Institute of Tuberculosis and Chest Surgery from 1968 through 1983 and directed the Kyiv Research Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery, where he also taught from 1983 through 1989.

In 1982, the famous surgeon announced that he would take a break from surgery and concentrate on cybernetics. This came as a result of mental stress and the inability to deal with patient deaths. He spent three months living in his cottage, designing social models, and visiting conferences. By November, Amosov began recovering and slowly resumed medical practice.

As one of the most famous surgeons in the world, Amosov considered operating on the esophagus, lungs, and particularly the heart to be his life’s work. He always took up the scalpel at the threat of an impending death of a patient, oftentimes when nobody else would do so. He created a whole school of cardiac surgeons in Ukraine; he advised the defense of 35 Doctor's and 85 Candidate’s Theses. A pioneer in cybernetic research in the USSR, Amosov developed directional models of the human organism, researched “artificial intelligence,” and attempted to build an “optimal society” model. The scientist left behind around 400 scientific papers, including 20 treatises on cardiovascular diseases, suppurant diseases, and tuberculosis, as well as on various topics in physiological, sociological, and psychological cybernetics.

Achievements

• 

  Amosov was one of the first in the Soviet Union to introduce into the practice the method of artificial blood circulation (1963), Amosov was first in the Soviet Union to perform the mistral valve replacement, and in 1965 for the first time in the world he created and introduced into practice the anti-thrombotic heart valves prosthesis. His groundbreaking work with artificial heart valves and related surgical procedures earned him some of the former Soviet Union’s most prestigious honors.
  
  During a fifty-year career, Amosov was a surgeon and administrator at the Yanovsky Ukrainian Research Institute, the Institute of Thoracic Surgery in Kyiv, Ukraine, and the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, among other institutions. He was deputy director of the Research Institute of Tuberculosis and Chest Surgery from 1968 through 1983 and directed the Kyiv Research Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery, where he also taught from 1983 through 1989.
  
  In addition to publishing many scientific works, he also wrote novels, short stories, and a memoir. Amosov's "The Thoughts and the Heart," "Notes from the Future," "PPG-2266. Field Surgeon Notes," "The Book of Happiness and Miseries," "Voices of the Times," "Artificial Intelligence," "My Health System" have been repeatedly published in Ukraine and abroad.
  
  Amosov was a fitness enthusiast as well, recognized by the Soviet general-reading public as the author of the 1965 book Thoughts on Health, a physical-fitness guide to better health for better living.
  
  Nikolai Amosov was the recipient of multiple orders including Hero of Socialist Labour title, two Orders of Lenin, the Order of the Patriotic War, two Orders of the Red Star, and Lenin Prize.
  
  By the order of Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine № 128-p of 12 March 2003, the Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine was named after Amosov.
  
  In 2003, a street in Kyiv was named after Amosov and the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine established the Mykola Amosov Prize which is awarded for the significant scientific works in the field of cardiovascular surgery and transplantology.
  
  In 2008, Nikolai Amosov was recognized as second after Yaroslav I the Wise among the Great Ukrainians by a public poll conducted for the TV show The Greatest Ukrainians.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Open Heart

    (The journal of two days and nights in the life of a great...)

    1966
  • PPG-2266: A surgeon's war 1975
  • Notes from the Future 1970

Religion

Nikolai's grandmother taught him to pray. But when he became a young pioneer, he ceased to believe in God and learned about socialism.

Politics

Amosov's party career was reduced only to the young pioneer organization - he entered neither Komsomol nor any other party.

He acknowledged socialism, but his attitude towards communist leadership was bad and he did not want to go to the Army. Evidently, he was influenced by the bitter experience of his family: his mother's brother and sister perished in concentration camps.

"I believed in "socialism with a human face," until I made sure that this ideology was Utopian, and the system non-efficient," said Amosov.

Views

Amosov saw the future of medicine in interdisciplinary sciences like biology, physics, chemistry, and cybernetics. The latter was going to turn medicine into one of the most precise sciences.

His view on the human body from the standpoint of bio-cybernetics is very interesting. He wrote, “A human is a complex, self-learning and self-organizing system. The system works using a multitude of strictly defined programs. If the body develops according to the program, the person is healthy. Sickness, on the other hand, is nothing but a manifestation of program erosion under the effect of biological, physiological, and other external forces.”

Amosov thought that the main task for future medicine was to achieve artificial control over the body, in order to define and modify its programs. His dream was to create an artificial intelligence.

Quotations: "If it were possible to live my life once more, I would have chosen the same: surgery and further to: philosophizing upon "eternal issues" of philosophy, such as truth, intellect, human being, society, future of mankind."

Membership

During his career, Nikolai Amosov was a member of the Presidium of the Board of the Ukrainian Society of surgeons and cardiologists, the International Association of surgeons and cardiologists, the International Association of Surgeons, the International Society of Cardiovascular Surgeons, the International Society for Medical Cybernetics, and the Scientific Council on Cybernetics of Ukraine.

• Presidium of the Board of the Ukrainian Society of surgeons and cardiologists , Ukraine

• Scientific Council on Cybernetics of Ukraine , Ukraine

• International Association of surgeons and cardiologists

• International Association of Surgeons

• International Society of Cardiovascular Surgeons

• International Society for Medical Cybernetics

Personality

Nikolai Amosov was not the kind of person who consoles himself with a phrase like "can't do anything about it." He will not reconcile himself even to the inevitable if it is inimical to man. "What I have achieved," he says, "will remain, produce shoots and live. But what I have experienced, been concerned about, all my cherished dreams - will they disappear? Disappear? But that can't be possible!" Such a train of thought dictated by a passionate love of life is typical of him. And maybe it is this love of life on the one hand and a rejection of death in general and of his own death in particular, on the other, that form the core of Amosov's personality and permeate all his activities.

Physical Characteristics: In the childhood, Nikolai was frail boy, he had many child infections, rickets, but he got stronger before school, and stopped getting sick.

Quotes from others about the person

• From the memoirs of I.K. Melnikov, who worked as a doctor at that time: "Amosov was a very simple person - without any aplomb and arrogance. When I worked as a doctor and did not even know Amosov’s face, once, leaving the building with medical journals, I ordered him, modestly standing near the building, to take these magazines to the sanatorium administration. Amosov silently took these magazines and also silently carried them to their destination. The next day, at a meeting with the head physician, where I and Amosov were present, Nikolai Mikhailovich remarked: "But I, the professor, have already been made a courier here..."

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  fitness

Connections

In 1934, Nikolai Amosov married Galina Soboleva. A few years later, their love was over, Nikolai was bored with his family life without children. He discussed the situation with Galina, and they decided to live separately for a while.

During World War II, in 1944, Amosov married Lida Denisenko. She volunteered to the war after the third year of study at a pedagogical college and served at the medical and sanitary battalion. Their romance lasted out for half a year till they married in the town of Rechitsa, Belarus. Before their marriage, Nikolai got a letter from Galina, his first wife: she was serving at the North Navy, she married and was expecting a child.

In 1956, Nikolai and Lydia's daughter Katya was born. Lydia's pregnancy proceeded with complications, therefore Cesarean section was performed.

Nikolai Amosov also had a granddaughter Anna. She was born on May 10, 1989, in Kyiv, Ukraine.

granddaughter :

Anna Mishalova

ex-wife:

Galina Soboleva

Wife:

Lydia Denisenko

Daughter:

Ekaterina Amosova

Friend:

Kirill Simonjan

Amosov met Kirill Simonjan in 1946 - they were friends till Simonjan's death.

References

• "Ukrainian Resurgence from Dependence to" by Bohdan Nahaylo
  1999