The Life and Death of a Soviet-Era Search for Longevity
secondary literature · 2024
LINK
SUMMARY
Modern secondary article by the McGill Office for Science and Society summarising the rise and fall of antireticular cytotoxic serum (ACS). Author and publication date confirmed by direct fetch of the page on 2026-05-28: byline reads 'Joe Schwarcz PhD | 20 Sep 2024' (mcgill_pubdate meta 2024-09-24T21:09:36Z) and the article notes it was first published in The Montreal Gazette. Source of two load-bearing quotations used verbatim in this bundle: Bogomolets's claim that people could 'live past a hundred, maybe even as long as a 150', and the postwar Western evaluation in which Harry Goldblatt (McGill MD 1916) was 'given a grant in the late 1940s to prepare and study the effects of ACS' and after reviewing the results of 3,500 patients treated at various centres 'concluded that it is not a cure for anything'. The article does not state Bogomolets's age at death, cause of death, or year of death, and does not contain the 'Stalin called him a swindler' anecdote that is sometimes attributed to it elsewhere; this bundle does not attribute those facts to Schwarcz.
NOTES
This article is the principal modern English-language synthesis of the ACS story used in the present bundle, but it is used narrowly: only for the longevity-target quotation, for the Stalin-as-patron framing (‘Stalin appointed Bogomolets director of the Institute of Clinical Physiology in Kyiv, where ACS was subsequently produced for wide distribution in the Soviet Union’ and ‘Stalin is said to have gotten shots of it from time to time’), and for the Goldblatt 3,500-patient evaluation. It is a secondary synthesis, not a primary archive, and is cited as such. Bogomolets’s birth and death dates and his institutional placement are anchored in the bundle against the PubMed-indexed biographical articles (neiman-bogomolets-memorial-1956, frank-knopov-bogomolets-2021) and Wikipedia, not against Schwarcz.