Later Years and Death
In 1924, Bogdanov started his blood transfusion experiments, apparently hoping to achieve eternal youth or at least partial rejuvenation. Lenin's sister Maria Ulianova was among many who volunteered to take part in Bogdanov's experiments. After undergoing 11 blood transfusions, he remarked with satisfaction on the improvement of his eyesight, suspension of balding, and other positive symptoms. The fellow revolutionary Leonid Krasin wrote to his wife that "Bogdanov seems to have become 7, no, 10 years younger after the operation". In 1925-1926, Bogdanov founded the Institute for Haemotology and Blood Transfusions, which was later named after him. But a later transfusion cost him life, when he took the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis. (Bogdanov died, but the student injected with his blood made a complete recovery.) Some scholars (e.g. Loren Graham) have speculated that his death may have been a suicide, because Bogdanov wrote a highly nervous political letter shortly beforehand. Others, however, attribute his death to blood type incompatibility, which was poorly understood at the time.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Bogdanov
Famous quotes containing the words years and/or death:
“Three years ago, also, when the Sims tragedy was acted, I said to myself, There is such an officer, if not such a man, as the Governor of Massachusetts,—what has he been about the last fortnight? Has he had as much as he could do to keep on the fence during this moral earthquake?... He could at least have resigned himself into fame.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“...here he is, fully alive, and it is hard to picture him fully dead. Death is thirty-three hours away and here we are talking about the brain size of birds and bloodhounds and hunting in the woods. You can only attend to death for so long before the life force sucks you right in again.”
—Helen Prejean (b. 1940)