On July 18, it was 102 years since the birth of the largest Russian genius, who did not operate a single person and saved millions of lives, Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov. Demichov is the father of transplantation. Most of his experiments he conducted in the raw basement laboratory of fifteen square meters of the Sklyphosophsky Institute.
In 1967, South African surgeon Christian Barnard first transplanted a human heart, he immediately became a millionaire, and then entered the list of the 200 most important people of the 20th century. About the fact that before this he had secretly trained in Demikhov's laboratory for several months, having come to the USSR as a tourist, he could not say, in order not to hurt Demikhov. Demichov continued his experiments on animals in a small laboratory, sometimes bringing them home, simply because in such conditions they did not always survive. This is the law of genius - the one who makes a real breakthrough in his field rarely has dividends from it, coupons will be cut by the one who follows the development of the idea.
The attitude to Demikhov of the Soviet Ministry of Health was ridiculously sad. The then head of the Ministry of Health called Demichov’s experiments “anti-scientific, charlatanic and harmful, but at the same time he was forbidden to go abroad because he demonstrated his experiments at a congress in Germany in 1958, for which he was accused of disclosing the state. The secrets. So I want to ask: so fake science or gentleman. The secret? As in an anecdote, the wife of her husband calls: "the goat, the goat, the impotent!" Her husband replied, “You will decide whether I am a cowboy or impotent.”
When the legendary Michael Debayki came to Moscow in 1996 to insure our doctors who were doing the heart shunt to Yeltsin, he told reporters that he would like to worship Demikhov. None of the journalists knew this name, then Debayki repeated by slogans, claiming that he was simply not understood. Debayki regretted that Demichov was not a doctor, but a biologist, and could not demonstrate his virtuous technique of operation on a human. And Demikhov at the time lived his age in a small one-bedroom apartment with old furniture. He was swept to the bottom of endless distress. In recent years, he has not even left the house because he could easily get lost. So ended his life the man who changed the world.