Petr Dmitrievich Gorizontov

Born Sept. 3 (16), 1902, in Petropavlovsk. Soviet pathophysiologist; academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (1962).

Gorizontov graduated from the Omsk Medical Institute in 1927 and took his further training under A. A. Bogomolets. He has been a professor since 1939. He became head of the subdepartment of pathological physiology at the First Moscow Medical Institute in 1941. From 1953 to 1960 he was head of the subdepartment of pathophysiology at the Central Advanced Training Institute for Doctors, from 1962 to 1968 he was director of the Institute of Biophysics of the Ministry of Public Health of the USSR; he had been head of the institute’s laboratory since 1952. His principal works have been the study of metabolic processes in the brain, the pathogenesis of radiation diseases, and the role of the adrenocortical steroid and pituitary hormones in pathology. He was the first to show the role of the neuroglia in cholesterol metabolism, he worked out the principles for the treatment of acute radiation disease, and he determined the changes in the blood during the various stages of stress reaction. He was chairman of the board of directors of the All-Union Scientific Medical Society of Pathophysiologists from 1956 to 1961. Gorizontov received the Lenin Prize in 1963, and he has been awarded two orders of Lenin, two other orders, and medals.