Nikolay Nikolaevich
Blokhin
1912-1993
Nikolay Nikolaevich Blokhin was the Director of the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Oncology of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, full member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR. He was born in the county town of Lukoyanov, the Nizhny Novgorod province, now it is the district centre of the Nizhny Novgorod region, in the family of a zemstvo doctor. Since 1916 he lived in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Since childhood, he made his career choice – he wanted to become a surgeon. In 1929 he finished high school and entered the Medical Faculty of Nizhny Novgorod University. In 1934 he graduated from Gorky Medical Institute. He worked at the Diveyevskaya District Hospital, then as a resident and assistant at the Department of Operative Surgery and the hospital surgical clinic of the Gorky Medical Institute. By the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, he had been a general surgeon of a wide profile. During the years of the war, Nikolai Nikolaevich Blokhin was the leading surgeon of a large evacuation hospital in the city of Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), then, from July 1943 to July 1946, he was the leading surgeon of a specialized hospital for reconstructive surgery. In July 1944 – January 1945 he trained in hospitals and clinics in the USA. In 1946 he defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic “Skin plastic surgery in the surgery of military injuries”. Subsequently, his monograph “Skin Plastic Surgery” (1955) was published on this topic, which was awarded the N.N. Burdenko Prize of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (1956). In 1948 Nikolai Nikolaevich Blokhin was also the first organizer of the Gorky Research Institute of Reconstructive Surgery (now the Nizhny Novgorod Research Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics). In 1950-1952 Nikolay Nikolaevich Blokhin was the Head of the Department of General Surgery and at the same time was the director of Gorky Medical Institute. During this period, he developed a number of new plastic surgeries for the treatment of granulation wounds and long-term non-healing ulcers. In 1952 Nikolai Nikolaevich Blokhin left for Moscow. Here he was engaged in the organization of an oncological centre – the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Cancer Therapy of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (later – the Institute of Experimental and Clinical Oncology). Under his leadership, the work on the study of the etiology and pathology of cancer was launched at the Institute, new domestic anti-cancer drugs were tested. He was a talented organizer, he decided to create a large cancer centre in which experimenters and clinicians would work hand in hand on equal terms. The leading research area of the Institute was antitumor chemotherapy. Then in the small clinical department of the Institute, Nikolai Nikolaevich Blokhin personally supervised the study of new antitumor drugs. N.N. Blokhin developed new options for operations for stomach cancer, methods of combined cancer therapy.
Address: Moscow, Serafimovicha str., 2
