Zavarzin

Zavarzin, Alexey Alekseyevich (born in 1886), histologist, professor at the Military Medical Academy. After graduating from the physics and mathematics faculty of St. Petersburg University in 1907, he was retained at the department of Professor Dogel; from 1910 he was assistant at St. Petersburg University and the Women's Medical Institute; from 1916 he was professor at the Perm State University, where from 1917 to 1922 he was dean of the medical faculty, and then of the physics and mathematics faculty. In Perm, Zavarzin carried out significant organizational work in equipping educational and auxiliary institutions and establishing the Biological Scientific Research Institute, of which he was the first director. In 1922 he was elected professor at the Military Medical Academy. Zavarzin's scientific works (about 50) relate to comparative histology, with the most significant ones published in foreign languages. Main works: 'Histological studies of the sensitivity of the nervous system and optical ganglia in insects' (dissertation, St. Petersburg, 1913); 'Contributions to the comparative histology of nerve centers' (Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie, Vol. CXXIV, 1924); 'The parallelism of structures as a basic principle of morphology' (ibid., Vol. CXXIV, 1925); 'Contributions to the comparative histology of blood and connective tissue' (Zeitschrift für mikroskopisch-anatomische Forschung, Vol. VI, 1926); 'Living substance' (Leningrad, 1928); 'Laboratory teaching of human anatomy' (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928). Zavarzin is a defender of morphological histology with its special regularities; he established the principle of 'structural parallelism,' according to which in different classes and types of animals the same function is manifested in identical structures, regardless of origin (spinal cord, optical ganglia, connective tissue).