Voronoff philosofy

1.The four monks nl movie, directed by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia in 1962, Aldo Fabrizi and Erminio Macario disguised as a monk in a monastery are forced to wash the feet of his brethren. Do not know why - perhaps to make it more quickly - in fact the two wash one foot for each brother. It was a time when the concept of "politically correct" was not so in vogue nowadays, and how, leg after leg, foot after foot, is the moment when the two brothers washing it presents a black-black. Which, of course, they are immediately categorized as dirt, before realizing, looking up, feet and legs that belong to what, then, would be a black man - now mitigated in "black" or, worse, " of color. "
All right. The episode took me back to a known page of the golden legend of Jacobus de Voragine (Varazze today) where the old man tells of an extraordinary work of Saints Cosmas and Damian, who, as we know, have long inspired and continue to inspire the little good that mankind has done and is doing to cure their ills. It is said, therefore, the caretaker of a church dedicated to precisely the same two saints in Rome - a guardian plagued by a terrible cancer in the leg when, one evening, the two saints appear with a knife in his hand. They ask where they can find a healthy leg and the guard tells them to pick her up in the cemetery of St. Peter in Chains where, on that day, cool cool, was buried an Ethiopian. Said and done: the guard wakes healed - and with a black leg - says the incident and, curious, go to the unearthing of the Ethiopian and find it with a healthy leg and the other - white, the Guardian - all eroded by cancer.
All that to say that, while neglecting the primitive case - that of Adam's rib from which God draws Eve - the idea of ​​transplanting accompanies the dreams of humanity from afar. The case of the three young men sacrificed by Pope Innocent VIII in order to receive a transfusion of their blood may be counted in this under "longevity" and "sexual prowess".
Clear traces of medical experiments designed to meet the needs of this kind can be detected in the double surgery with which the German physiologist Arnold Adolph Berthold, in 1849, before a rooster turns into a capon and then turn it back into his own re-engaged a rooster testis. More or less the same line moved forty years after the French physician Brown-Sequard claimed to have rebelled against their retirement and succeeded brilliantly grafting of aqueous extracts of dog testicles. Which, according to historians of science (such as Federico Di Trocchio in The lies of science, Collins, London 1993, pp. 159-163), is probably false, because testosterone is not very soluble in water - is more likely, then , that the experiment has not been done or is not Brown-Sequard has enjoyed a "placebo effect".
If we add that, in 1902, Alexis Carrel invented the technique for vascular suturing dell'anostomosi blood vessels, we can say that the advent of a Voronoff was so mature.



Serge Voronoff



2. Serge Voronoff - following his insights on the endocrine system - has the idea of ​​grafting monkey testicles sliced ​​in human testes. Eight fragments grafted them, after local anesthesia, in Anatole France - when the great writer, according to him, he was almost sixty years and cadaveric ("premature senility" was the diagnosis) - and they get a wonderful 23 days after erection, likely to be repeated several times in subsequent days. But the story has some inconsistencies, as Voronoff only works on humans from 1920 onwards - and, at the time, Anatole France, of years, it has 76. This introduces the problem of the scientific successes of Voronoff. These achievements can be questioned first of all for what - since 1960, thanks to Peter Medawar and Burnet Mcfarlane - we know about the immune response, and all'istocompatibilità to transplant rejection. Secondly, of course, can be questioned for what we now know the placebo effect, or how important the persuasion of the patient in any treatment process.
It is now anzianissimo, Voronoff, when he writes from idiot to genius that today - as part of consolidated un'ormai series dedicated to the fundamentals and history of science, with a fine essay by Massimo Rizzardini, is republished by Melquiades. Voronoff the public in New York, in 1941, where he has taken refuge to escape the racial laws in France - the same energetically supported by his friend Alexis Carrel - and, in some ways, is also a kind of reporting its existence. Cites his own successes and theorizes pro domo.
From an idiot - an idiot at that time before the physical design categorical - the genius, however, the passage is not very easy. Thyroxine - Thyroid hormone - can bring in a few months the idiot up to normal, but the genius to come, we want more: the emergence of superior forces from the subconscious - a subconscious, even here, more physical than categorical: a similar of what we now call "limbic system" - and, perhaps, the membership of humble social classes (never saw the son of the banker to do something good, it is always possible that something extraordinary is out of the miller's son).
The genius, however - once you become such - will not have an easy life, because it will address what it Voronoff - with nineteenth-century Darwinian language - called the "struggles". They must fight the musicians, writers, poets, painters and, of course, have to fight the scientists of genius. Against what? Against envy and jealousy of the genius who did not. Conspiratorial against corporations ready to do anything to preserve their privileges not making way for the new genius who, with his discovery, he would put into question at least - if not undermined at the base - the authorities.
The only category of genes to some extent exempt from the struggle - and here Voronoff shows all its blissful innocence - is that of the philosophers. That, on the one hand, "are not fighters" on the other, mostly, no one understands them, "are lost in the clouds," and, therefore, no one envies anything.
The philosophers, however, there would be some that the principle of the struggle, reluctantly, must comply with. It would of philosophers who would fight the human vices, imposing new morality, religion and purify the prospect of political ideals. These philosophers would be revolutionary - the example of Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Spinoza, all people who, if the skin has not left us in a bad way, at least have had difficult lives - and should be kept distinct from those that " forced to submit their cells to a gym thinking intensively managed to make her climb to dizzying heights from which they do not see anything. "
Do you think, good Voronoff, that the "metaphysical" - ie those who "suppress their dissertations in a vague language still more vague and obscure," a language in which "the reader does not understand anything because it has nothing to understand" - by virtue of watertight compartments, are well separated from the others - as well as estetologi, which, in fact, nobody would have dreamed of pursuing.
The fact that any opinion as to the moral or aesthetic, to the right or to the natural sciences can-indeed, must - be descended directly from metaphysical assumptions or otherwise relating to the theory of knowledge, not even go for the head. The idea that any judgment - whether moral or aesthetic - inevitably resulting in the awareness or unawareness of who makes it, by a system of thought does not even touches him.
The way Voronoff tells about herself - the discreet way which celebrates its achievements and its prestige: thousands of grafts of testes of chimpanzees in the world's rich and powerful - is typical of certain "large" which, in the academy and in the salons of his own science, believe they have received less than they deserved. In principle, he is more than enough, to build a theory of the social world, consoling of mistrust suffered, justify the persecution or what, in one way or another, with a name or the other - subject to the bank account, because the genius, from time to time, pay - believes that he has suffered.

Felice Accame