(Note the shift in metaphors to keep up with the cultural changes in perception of technology.) Drosophila, by contrast, could be a factory for Ph.D.s in many labs, a much more transportable experimental system spreading more rapidly than Pavlov’s dogs. It is interesting to compare for example with Robert Kohler’s metaphor of Drosophila in the hands of the Morgan school as a “breeder reactor” for data, Ph.D.s, professorships, and so on. 186) how the factory metaphor, for Pavlov, motivated and inspired a particular set of research questions. But Todes’s analysis of how Pavlov created his “physiology factory” still seems as fertile as when he introduced the metaphor more than fifteen years ago, playing on Pavlov’s own metaphor of the digestive system as a complex chemical factory. Chapter 17, about Pavlov’s move from studying nervous control of digestion to expand his focus to “targeting the psyche” as a whole, is substantially revised as noted above, this is a major theme of the biography. He weaves in the most important findings of his own earlier book, Pavlov’s Physiology Factory, in chapters 11, 12, 14, 17, and 18. Todes paints a convincing portrait of the young physiologist in a newly liberalizing Russia. The real Pavlov is far more interesting than the simplistic version most Americans think they know. 498–500) and experimentally validated it by producing neuroses in dogs in the laboratory. This approach even took seriously Freud’s theory of the neuroses (pp. Indeed, his early work on digestive glands, we learn, became more important after 1897–98 as a springboard in Pavlov’s ambitious attempt to understand the psyche by a far less reductionist approach. A July 14, 1923, New York Times article about Pavlov’s visit to America mistranslated his “conditional reflexes.” The writer misinterpreted Pavlov’s experiments to believe they supported behaviorism, popular in the United States at that time, notwithstanding that Pavlov felt his work profoundly opposed behaviorism. From the very first page, Todes tells us surprising things: that in America, the idea of “conditioned reflexes”-that is, by ringing a bell Pavlov got dogs to salivate and this was his most important contribution-is mistaken in almost all respects. At 730 pages of text and an additional 125 pages of scholarly apparatus, this will stand as the definitive work on Pavlov for decades to come. This is the long-awaited, magisterial biography that culminates twenty-five years of painstaking work on Pavlov’s science by one of history of biology’s foremost scholars.
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