[Dr. Samuel Serge Voronoff (1866-1951) or "the quest for eternal youth"]

Samuel Serge Voronoff, a French physician and surgeon of Russian origin was the Khédive's personal physician from 1896 to 1910 and the instigator of modern medicine in Egypt. He was later a student and friend of Alexis Carrel as soon as 1910 and directed a service of bone grafts during World War I. Between 1912 and 1949 he published the results of his experimental work at his Voronoff Foundation of the Collège de France and at Grimaldi where he performed homografts of endocrine glands of cattle and corresponding heterografts between great primates and man. Contested since 1922 by his colleagues for his results however histologically confirmed and improved durable, Voronoff who had an audience in the Académie des Sciences will proceed his research with success during the period preceding World War II. He grafted old people in senior homes and Government cattle in Algeria, training followers in Italy and California. In 1939 he gave all his research facilities at the Collège de France to René Leriche (1879-1955) and remained on the American continent until 1945. At that time his theories became obsolete in view of the progress in endocrinology and his laboratories were destroyed during the war. He died in Lausanne in 1951 at 85. The recent epidemics caused by HIV suggests to study the work he performed in the Collège de France.