1. Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff was a French surgeon of Russian origin who gained fame for his practice of xenotransplantation of monkey testicle tissues onto the testicles of men, purportedly as an anti-aging therapy while working in France in the 1920s and 1930s.
Serge Voronoff was born to a Jewish family in the village Shekhman, Tambov Governorate in Russia shortly before July 10,1866, the date of his circumcision in a synagogue.
In 1895 at the age of 29, Voronoff became a naturalized French citizen.
Serge Voronoff was a student of French surgeon, biologist, eugenicist, and Nobel Prize recipient Alexis Carrel, from whom he learnt surgical techniques of transplantation.
Serge Voronoff married his second wife, Evelyn Bostwick, in 1920.
Serge Voronoff died on March 3,1921, at the age of 48.
Serge Voronoff's legacy gave Voronoff a large income for the rest of his life.
Ten years later, Serge Voronoff married Gerti Schwartz, believed by some to be the illegitimate daughter of King Carol of Romania.
Serge Voronoff outlived him and became the Condesa da Foz upon Voronoff's death.
Serge Voronoff died on September 3,1951, in Lausanne, Switzerland, from complications following a fall.
Serge Voronoff is buried in the Russian section of the Caucade Cemetery in Nice.
Serge Voronoff believed glandular transplants would produce more sustained effects than mere injections.
Serge Voronoff moved on to transplanting the testicles of executed criminals into millionaires, but, when demand outstripped supply, he turned to using monkey testicle tissue instead.
In 1917, Serge Voronoff began being funded by Evelyn Bostwick, a wealthy American socialite and the daughter of Jabez Bostwick.
Between 1917 and 1926, Serge Voronoff carried out over five hundred transplantations on sheep and goats, and on a bull, grafting testicles from younger animals to older ones.
Serge Voronoff's observations indicated that the transplantations caused the older animals to regain the vigor of younger animals.
Serge Voronoff considered monkey-gland transplantation an effective treatment to counter senility.
Serge Voronoff speculates that the grafting surgery might be beneficial to people with "dementia praecox", the mental illness known today as schizophrenia.
Serge Voronoff tried the reverse experiment, transplanting a human ovary into a female monkey, and then tried to inseminate the monkey with human sperm.
Serge Voronoff's experiments ended following pressure from a sceptical scientific community and a change in public opinion.
Part of the basis of Serge Voronoff's work was that testicles are glands, much like the thyroid and adrenal glands.
Serge Voronoff believed that at some point, scientists would discover what substance the testicular glands secrete, making grafting surgery unnecessary.
Serge Voronoff expected that this new discovery would prove his theories.
Kozminski and Bloom wrote that Serge Voronoff's experiments were "plagued by secrecy, subjectivity and sensationalism", adding that the era of testosterone surgery was ended by a "lack of verifiable data".
Serge Voronoff was the prototype for Professor Preobrazhensky in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Heart of a Dog, published in 1925.