Grigorii Viktorovich Gershuni

Born July 21 (Aug. 3), 1905, in Minsk. Soviet animal and human physiologist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1964).

Gershuni graduated from the First Leningrad Medical Institute (1927) and joined its physiology department in 1925. He worked at the S. M. Kirov Military Medicine Academy under the direction of L. A. Orbeli during 1931-36. He joined the I. P. Pavlov Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1936 and became director of the laboratory of the physiology of hearing in 1951. His principal works are on the adaptive influence of the sympathetic nervous system on nerve-muscle function (1927-32) and on the physiology of the sense organs, primarily the organs of hearing (since 1932). He discovered a method for quantitative evaluation of the activity of the organs of hearing (objective audiometry), advanced the concept of the processing of information from the organs of hearing in the nervous system, and proposed methods for diagnosis of disease of the hearing centers. Numerous works by Gershuni have been published in scientific periodicals and in the anthology Hearing Mechanisms (1967, edited by Gershuni). He was awarded the I. P. Pavlov Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1949) and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.