mitogenetic radiation, since he believed that this light radiation allowed the morphogenetic field to control embryonic development. His published observations, which related that cell proliferation of an onion was accelerated by directing these rays down a tube, brought him great attention. Some 500 attempts at replication, however, produced overwhelmingly negative results, so that the idea was neglected for decades until it commanded some renewed interest in the later 20th century. However the furore, which may have sparked Wilhelm Reich's similar Orgone experiments, brought Gurwitsch an international reputation that led to several European lecture tours. His work influenced that of Paul Alfred Weiss in particular. William Seifriz regarded the existence of Gurwitsch rays as experimentally proven. Later life Gurwitsch was Professor of Histology and Embryology at Moscow University from 1924 to 1929 but fell afoul of the Communist Party and was forced to relinquish the chair. He then directed a laboratory at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Leningrad from 1930 until 1945, though he was forced to evacuate during World War 2. In 1941, he was awarded a Stalin Prize for his mitogenetic radiation work, since it had apparently led to a cheap and simple way of diagnosing cancer. He was director of the Institute of Experimental Biology in Leningrad from 1945 to 1948. He sought to redefine his "heretical" concept of the morphogenetic field in general essays, pointing to molecular interactions unexplained by chemistry. Gurwitsch retired in 1948 after Trofim Lysenko came to power but continued working at home. Sadly, his wife Lydia died in 1951. However, his daughter, Anna, continued his work and, shortly after his death, contributed papers that supported some aspects of her father's work on "mitogenetic" rays. Legacy Field theories of morphogenesis had their heyday in the 1920s, but the increasing success of genetics confined such ideas to the backwaters of biology. Gurwitsch had been ahead of his time in his interest in the emergent properties of the embryo, but more modern self-organization theories (such as that of Ilya Prigogine) and treatments of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in living systems would show the extent to which the vectors he described can be generated without the assumption of an overarching field, so the search for a physical field was abandoned in favour of more neutral concepts like the paradigm of Systems Biology. The early interest in physics which inspired Gurwitsch in the end tended to render his ideas