Mykola Iabluchanskyi

We have long understood aging through the lens of individual organs — the failing heart, the stiffening artery, the declining kidney. Modern medicine has grown extraordinarily sophisticated at intervening in each of these systems in isolation. And yet, for all that sophistication, the fundamental question of why the body ages as a coordinated whole, rather than as a collection of independent failures, has remained stubbornly unanswered. The answer, emerging from the frontier of experimental gerontology, may lie not inside our cells or organs at all, but in the connective tissue that links them — the vast, largely invisible medium through which every physiological process in the body ultimately unfolds. Connective tissue is easy to underestimate. We tend to think of it as structural filler — the scaffolding that holds everything else in place. But this picture misses something profound. Connective tissue is not passive architecture. It is an active regulatory environment: a living matri...

There are books that inform, books that inspire, and rare books that do something more difficult — they hold a mirror to the machinery of power and dare the reader to look without flinching. Mykola Iabluchanskyi's memoir of the revival of classical university medical education at V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University belongs firmly in that third, rarer category. Written from personal experience and revised a quarter-century later with the wisdom of hindsight, it is a document that transcends its subject matter and speaks to every society still wrestling with the inheritance of authoritarianism. On the surface, the book appears to be an institutional history — the story of how a medical faculty was born, attacked, nearly strangled, and ultimately survived within a Ukrainian university during the turbulent post-independence years of the 1990s. But to read it only at that level is to miss its deeper architecture. This is, at its core, a study of how bureaucratic systems weaponize p...

Somewhere in the cold water of a tidal pool, an octopus is doing something extraordinary. It is solving a puzzle, changing color in its sleep, and operating eight semi-independent arms — all at once. For neuroscientists and philosophers of mind, this creature is not just a curiosity. It is a living laboratory for one of the deepest questions in science: what is consciousness, and where does it live? The octopus split from the vertebrate lineage roughly 750 million years ago. Since that ancient divergence, our brains and theirs have evolved in near-total isolation, arriving at radically different solutions to the problem of intelligence. A human brain is a centralized command structure. The octopus nervous system is something else entirely: only about a third of its neurons sit in the central brain; the remaining two-thirds are distributed across its eight arms. Each arm can sense, plan, and act with considerable independence, raising a question that cuts to the heart of consciousness ...

Throughout history, countless stories recount extraordinary experiences that seem to defy our understanding of reality. Among these, prophetic dreams and visions are particularly compelling — moments when individuals glimpse future events or receive messages that later prove remarkably accurate. As a doctor, mathematician, and educator, I've always been fascinated by the intricacies of the human mind. Yet it wasn't until I had my own prophetic experiences that I began to truly appreciate the depth of this mystery. Over the years, I've been fortunate to experience three profound prophetic dreams and one vivid daytime vision. Each left an indelible mark on my understanding of consciousness and reality. The first involved my father and served as a harbinger of a significant life event. Initially cryptic, its details unfolded in reality with startling accuracy — my first indication that these phenomena might be more than coincidence. Two other dreams carried messages of deep ...

Pyotr Anokhin’s functional systems theory looks like “old Soviet physiology” only if we judge it by publication dates. Conceptually, it belongs much closer to contemporary AI, cybernetics, and control theory than to classical reflex diagrams. At its core, TFS is not about muscles and nerves; it is about how any system acts purposefully, stabilizes itself, and learns from its own errors. Crucially, this logic scales: the same conceptual loop can describe a neuron, an animal, a machine-learning agent, a hospital, or a city. Traditional neurophysiology treated behavior as a chain of reflexes: stimuli arrive, responses follow. This linear model works for simple, short‑latency reactions but breaks down when we try to explain planning, strategy shifts, or long-term goals. Reflex theory is always oriented to the past; it has no conceptual room for the future. Anokhin reverses the arrow. For him, the primary element is not the stimulus but the result. Organisms act because they must achieve s...

The desire for a long life is ancient. The desire for a meaningful one — a life in which identity, purpose, and the coherent sense of self are preserved as long as the body endures — is considerably more recent. And it demands a fundamentally different approach to medicine than the one we currently practice. Modern medicine has achieved remarkable things. Hearts are sustained, lungs supported, laboratory values normalized, and survival extended across conditions that would have been rapidly fatal a generation ago. Yet something critical is being lost in the process. The body persists while the person fades. Memory unravels, character dissolves, agency retreats — and the medical system, organized around keeping biological systems running, often has no framework for registering this loss, let alone preventing it. We are winning the battle for years while losing the war for the self. This uncoupling — between the biological life that continues and the personal life that erodes — is the de...

Evidence-based medicine was conceived as a safeguard — a commitment to letting rigorous data, rather than tradition or authority, guide clinical decisions. Few would argue with that founding principle. Yet something has shifted. Across cardiology, gastroenterology, and beyond, a pattern is emerging that deserves serious scrutiny: the systematic alignment of clinical evidence with commercial imperatives. The 2024 European Congress of Cardiology lowered its blood pressure thresholds to match American standards, instantly expanding the pool of patients eligible for treatment. Specialists commenting online were blunt about their suspicions: that pharmaceutical market expansion, not improved patient outcomes, was the primary driver. Whether or not that suspicion is entirely fair, the question it raises is legitimate. When diagnostic thresholds shift in ways that consistently favor treatment over watchful waiting, we should ask who benefits. The pattern repeats across drug classes. Each gene...