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Alexander Gurwitsch
Alexander Gavrilovich Gurwitsch (also Gurvich,
Gurvitch; Russian: Алекса́ндр Гаври́лович Гу́рвич;
Alexander Gurwitsch
1874–1954) was a Russian and Soviet biologist and medical
scientist who originated the morphogenetic field theory and
discovered the biophoton.[1]

Contents
Early life
Morphogenetic field theory
The biophoton
Later life
Legacy
Born 26 September 1874
See also
Poltava, Russian
Bibliography Empire
References Died 27 July 1954
Sources (aged 79)
Moscow, USSR
Citizenship Russia-USSR
Early life Known for Morphogenetic Field
Theory, Mitogenetic
Gurwitch was the son of a Jewish provincial lawyer; his family
was artistic and intellectual, and he decided to study medicine Radiation
only after failing to gain a place studying painting. After Scientific career
research in the laboratory of Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer, he Fields Developmental biology
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.

Morphogenetic field theory

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 aided 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

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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 Hans Driesch, and the two developed a mutual professional admiration.[2]

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.

The biophoton
After the 1917 revolution, Gurwitsch fell upon hard times and accepted the chair of Histology at
Taurida University, the chief seat of learning of the Crimean Peninsula, where he spent seven
happy years. Here in 1923, he first observed biophotons or ultra-weak biological photon emissions
– weak electromagnetic waves which were detected in the ultra-violet range of the spectrum.

Gurwitsch named the phenomenon mitogenetic radiation, since he believed that this light
radiation allowed the morphogenetic field to control embryonic development. His published
observations, which related that cell proliferation of an onion was accelerated by directing these
rays down a tube, brought him great attention. Some 500 attempts at replication, however,
produced overwhelmingly negative results, so that the idea was neglected for decades until it
commanded some renewed interest in the later 20th century.[3] However the furore, which may
have sparked Wilhelm Reich's similar Orgone experiments, brought Gurwitsch an international
reputation that led to several European lecture tours. His work influenced that of Paul Alfred Weiss
in particular. William Seifriz regarded the existence of Gurwitsch rays as experimentally proven.[4]

Later life
Lydia and Anna Gurwitsch
"heretical" concept of the morphogenetic field in general essays, pointing to molecular interactions
unexplained by chemistry.
Gurwitsch was Professor of Histology and Embryology at
Moscow University from 1924 to 1929 but fell afoul of the
Communist Party and was forced to relinquish the chair. He
then directed a laboratory at the Institute of Experimental
Medicine in Leningrad from 1930 until 1945, though he was
forced to evacuate during World War 2. In 1941, he was
awarded a Stalin Prize for his mitogenetic radiation work, since
it had apparently led to a cheap and simple way of diagnosing
cancer. He was director of the Institute of Experimental Biology
in Leningrad from 1945 to 1948. He sought to redefine his

Gurwitsch retired in 1948 after Trofim Lysenko came to power but continued working at home.[5]
Sadly, his wife Lydia died in 1951. However, his daughter, Anna, continued his work and, shortly
after his death, contributed papers that supported some aspects of her father's work on
"mitogenetic" rays.[6]

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Legacy
Field theories of morphogenesis had their heyday in the 1920s, but the increasing success of
genetics confined such ideas to the backwaters of biology. Gurwitsch had been ahead of his time in
his interest in the emergent properties of the embryo, but more modern self-organization theories
(such as that of Ilya Prigogine) and treatments of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in living
systems would show the extent to which the vectors he described can be generated without the
assumption of an overarching field, so the search for a physical field was abandoned in favour of
more neutral concepts like the paradigm of Systems Biology. The early interest in physics which
inspired Gurwitsch in the end tended to render his ideas untenable.[7] The "mitogenetic ray" was
one of the scientific topics characterized by Irving Langmuir as "pathological science."[8]

However, the tenacity of Anna Gurwitsch, together with the development of the photon counter
multiplier, resulted in the confirmation of the phenomenon of biophotons in 1962. The observation
was duplicated in a Western laboratory by Quickenden and Que Hee in 1974.[9] In the same year,
Dr. V. P. Kaznacheyev announced that his research team in Novosibirsk had detected intercellular
communication by means of these rays.[10] Fritz-Albert Popp claims they exhibit coherent patterns.
These studies have drawn only fringe interest.

There has been a recent revival in field theories of life, albeit again at the fringes of science,
particularly among those who seek to include an account of developmental psychobiology. The
influence of Gurvitsch's theory is particularly evident in the work of the British plant physiologist,
Rupert Sheldrake, and his concept of "morphic resonance."

See also
▪ Regional specification
▪ Hans Spemann
▪ Walter John Kilner

Bibliography
▪ A. G. Gurvich. The Theory of Biological Field. - Moscow: Soviet Science, 1944.
▪ A. G. Gurvich. Mitogenetic radiation [3rd ed.] - Moscow, 1945.

References
1. Developmental Biology 8e Online: The "Re-discovery" of Morphogenic Fields (http://8e.devbio.
com/article.php?id=18) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20100916203446/http://8e.devbi
o.com/article.php?id=18) 2010-09-16 at the Wayback Machine
2. This account, and much other biographical material presented here, is based upon the short
biography by his grandson Lev Beloussov, which is in turn based upon Gurwitsch's own
unpublished autobiographical notes. http://www.ijdb.ehu.es/web/contents.php?vol=41&
issue=6&doi=9449452 - retrieved May 2008.
3. Brief popular accounts appear in G. L. Playfair and S. Hill, "The Cycles of Heaven" (Souvenir,
1978, Pan 1979) and S. Ostrander and L. Schroeder, "PSI: Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron
Curtain", Abacus 1973.

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4. Seifriz, William (1931). "Radiant energy from living matter". Science Education. 16 (1): 34–37.
Bibcode:1931SciEd..16...34S (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1931SciEd..16...34S).
doi:10.1002/sce.3730160109 (https://doi.org/10.1002%2Fsce.3730160109).
5. Vadim J. Birstein. The Perversion Of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science. Westview
Press (2004) ISBN 0-8133-4280-5
6. A.A.Gurwitsch, "Problems of mitogenetic radiation as an aspect of molecular biology",
Meditaina, Leningrad 1968.
7. Beloussov, op.cit.
8. For a review and bibliography, see Hollander and Claus, J. Opt. Soc. Am., 25, 270-286 (1935)
9. T. I. Quickenden and S. S. Que Hee, "Weak luminescence from the yeast Saccharomyces
cerevisiae and the existence of mitogenetic radiation," Biochemical and Biophysical Research
Communications 60 (2) 764-9, 1974, cited in Playfair and Hill, op. cit. p. 366 n. 24.
10. Playfair and Hill op.cit. p107

Sources
▪ L. Blyakher, S. Zalkind. Alexander Gavrilovich Gurvich. Bulletin of Moscow Society of
Naturalists. Department of Biology, 1955, Vol 60, Part 4: Alexander Gavrilovich Gurvich,
Moscow, 1970 (a bibliography).
▪ Biophotonics (L.V.Beloussov and F.-A. Popp eds) BioInform Services, Moscow, 1995.
▪ Biophotonics and Coherent Systems (L. V. Beloussov, F.-A. Popp, V.L. Voeikov and R. van Wijk
eds) Moscow University Press, Moscow 2000.
▪ Biophotonics and Coherent Systems in Biology by L. V. Beloussov (editor), V. L. Voeikov
(editor), V. S. Martynyuk (editor), Springer Science+Business Media, LLC., 2007, New York.

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