Alexander Gurvich
| Alexander Gurwitsch | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 26 September 1874 Poltava, Russian Empire |
| Died |
27 July 1954 (aged 79) Moscow, USSR |
| Citizenship | Russia-USSR |
| Known for | Morphogenetic Field Theory, Mitogenetic Radiation |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Developmental biology |
Alexander Gavrilovich Gurwitsch (also Gurvich, Gurvitch; Russian: Алекса́ндр Гаври́лович Гу́рвич; 1874–1954) was a Russian and Soviet biologist and medical scientist who originated the morphogenetic field theory and discovered the biophoton.
Gurwitch was the son of a Jewish provincial lawyer: his family was artistic and intellectual and he decided to study medicine only after failing to gain a place studying painting. After research in the laboratory of Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer he began to specialise in embryology, publishing his first paper, on the biochemistry of gastrulation, in 1895. He graduated from Munich University in 1897, having studied under A.A. Boehm.
After graduation he worked in the histology laboratories of the universities of Strasbourg and Bern until 1907. At this time he met his future wife and lifelong collaborator, the Russian-born medical trainee Lydia Felicine. His continuing interest, with the help of his relative Leonid Mandelstam, in the advances in physics at that time was to help in the formulation of his morphogenetic field theory, which Gurwitsch himself viewed throughout his life as no more than a suggestive hypothesis.
Serving in 1904 with the Russian army in the field he had much time to think, and he reasoned with himself that even a full understanding of every developmental process might not provide, or even necessarily lead to, a sense of understanding of ontogeny as a whole: a holistic, "top-down" model was needed to explain the ordered sequence of such individual processes. This conviction led him to adopt field theory as an embryological paradigm. His ideas had much in common with his contemporary Driesch and the two developed a mutual professional admiration.
During the next decade Gurwitsch contributed a series of landmark papers arguing that the orientation and division of cells was random at local level but was rendered coherent by an overall field which obeyed the regular inverse square law - an enterprise that required extensive statistical analysis. In 1907 he published his general treatise Atlas and Outline of Embryology of Vertebrates and of Man.
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