Alexander Gavrilovich Gurwitsch (also Gurvich, Gurvitch; ; 1874–1954) was a Russian and Soviet biologist and medical scientist who originated the morphogenetic field theory and discovered the biophoton. Early life Gurwitch was the son of a Jewish provincial lawyer; his family was artistic and intellectual, and he decided to study medicine only after failing to gain a place studying painting. After research in the laboratory of Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer, he began to specialise in embryology, publishing his first paper on the biochemistry of gastrulation in 1895. He graduated from Munich University in 1897, having studied under A. A. Boehm. Morphogenetic field theory After graduation, he worked in the histology laboratories of the universities of Strasbourg and Bern until 1907. At this time, he met his future wife and lifelong collaborator, the Russian-born medical trainee Lydia Felicine. His continuing interest, with the help of his relative Leonid Mandelstam, in the advances in physics at that time aided in the formulation of his morphogenetic field theory, which Gurwitsch himself viewed throughout his life as no more than a suggestive hypothesis. Serving in 1904 with the Russian army in the field, he had much time to think, and he reasoned with himself that even a full understanding of every developmental process might not provide, or even necessarily lead to, a sense of understanding of ontogeny as a whole; a holistic, "top-down" model was needed to explain the ordered sequence of such individual processes. This conviction led him to adopt field theory as an embryological paradigm. His ideas had much in common with his contemporary Hans Driesch, and the two developed a mutual professional admiration. During the next decade, Gurwitsch contributed a series of landmark papers arguing that the orientation and division of cells was random at local level but was rendered coherent by an overall field which obeyed the regular inverse square law – an enterprise that required extensive statistical analysis. In 1907, he published his general treatise Atlas and Outline of Embryology of Vertebrates and of Man. The biophoton After the 1917 revolution, Gurwitsch fell upon hard times and accepted the chair of Histology at Taurida University, the chief seat of learning of the Crimean Peninsula, where he spent seven happy years. Here in 1923, he first observed biophotons or ultra-weak biological photon emissions – weak electromagnetic waves which were detected in the ultra-violet range of the spectrum. Gurwitsch named the phenomenon