Famous Russian doctors. Anatoly Alexandrovich Smorodintsev
учебно-методический материал по английскому языку (10 класс)

Anatoly Alexandrovich Smorodintsev was born in 1901 in the village of Askino, Ufa province of the Russian Empire.

In 1918 he graduated with honors from the real school in Birsk and moved to the Siberian city of Tomsk, where he became a student of the Medical Faculty of Tomsk University. After graduation, he was left as an assistant at the Tomsk Bacteriological Institute.

Since the early 1950s, Anatoly Smorodintsev was studying polio viruses. Epidemics most often affected the USA, Sweden, England. The disease that affected the respiratory organs claimed thousands of lives, acquiring the character of a global disaster.

In the same 1950s, polio caused a major epidemic in the USSR for the first time. Tens of thousands of people got sick, but information about it was banned. No  were reported. The Ministry of Health was powerless, there were no means to combat the disease.

The disease was officially recognized, and a group of scientists was sent to the United States, which included Marina Voroshilova, Mikhail Chumakov and Anatoly Smorodintsev. The huge work lasted for two years, and finally a life-saving live polio vaccine was created.

Smorodintsev had to prove its harmlessness, and virologists traditionally conducted tests on themselves by drinking a liquid containing vaccine strains. Then the vaccine should be tested on young children who were not immune to the disease. But it was impossible to find a family that voluntarily provided a child for a dangerous experience, and Smorodintsev offered to test the vaccine on his five-year-old grandaughter Lena.

For two weeks of the experiment, everyone waited with trepidation for the appearance of antibodies causing an immune response. Finally, when this happened and Lena did not get sick, it was decided to give the vaccine to the children of some other employees of the department. They also did not get sick and acquired full immunity to the virus. The live vaccine made it possible to refuse painful injections, it was placed in pills, which the children swallowed like candy.

In 1959, about two million children in the USSR were vaccinated with the vaccine. Widespread immunization has led to a sharp decrease in morbidity, and in some areas to its complete elimination. At the Polio Institute, Mikhail Chumakov established the production of vaccines, and it soon had to be expanded, as desperate requests for the rescue of children began to come from many countries.

The mothers of Japan even staged a march demanding vaccination with the miraculous "Russian vaccine".

The Smorodintsev family repeated their feat once again when a measles vaccine was created under the guidance of a scientist at the Pasteur Leningrad Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology. It is now widely used all over the world, and Anatoly Alexandrovich has already tested it on his other granddaughter, Lisa.

In the list of Smorodintsev's merits, you can also add the creation of vaccines against mumps and influenza under his leadership. And in 1967, he founded and headed the Influenza Research Institute: the scientist was rightfully considered one of the world's largest authorities in the field of research of this disease.

In 1986, Anatoly Alexandrovich Smorodintsev died in Leningrad (from anesthesia incorrectly prescribed before surgery); he was buried at the Theological Cemetery, where three words are stamped on his tombstone: "To the Creator of Soviet Virology."

Vocabulary

Strains – деформации

Morbidity – заболеваемость  

Elimination – устранение

Influenza – грипп

Mumps – свинка

Exercise:  Read the text and restore the chronological sequence of events.

1. Smorodintsev began to study polio viruses.
2. He founded and headed the Influenza Research Institute.
3. Smorodintsev offered to test the vaccine on his granddaughter Lena.
4. A life-saving live vaccine against polio has been created.
5. Moved to the Siberian city of Tomsk.
6. Mothers of Japan staged a march demanding vaccination with the miraculous "Russian vaccine".