Childhood

He was born into a family of peasants. His mother was a midwife and worked in a village near the city of Cherepovets. His father left for the First World War in 1914, and when he returned, he soon left the family. From the age of 12 to 18, he studied at school in Cherepovets, then at a mechanical college.

Student days

From 1932 he worked in Arkhangelsk as a shift supervisor at a power plant at a sawmill. In 1934, he began his studies at the Correspondence Industrial Institute. In 1935, he entered the Arkhangelsk Medical Institute and graduated with honors in 1939. Along with working in medicine, he continued his studies at the correspondence institute. He chose the project of a large airplane with a steam turbine as the topic for his diploma. In 1940, he received his engineering degree with honors.

Career

After graduating from the institute and until the beginning of the German-Soviet war, he worked as a surgeon at a hospital in Cherepovets. He worked in the mobilization commission, and after a while was appointed chief surgeon at the Field Mobile Hospital. After that, he worked as a surgeon in Moscow.

In 1952, he moved to Ukraine to Kyiv, where he lived for 49 years. It was in Kyiv that Mykola Amosov became interested in the study of cardiac surgery, which brought him worldwide fame. In March 1953, he defended his doctoral dissertation in medicine on "Lung resections in tuberculosis". In 1955, he was the first in Ukraine to treat heart defects surgically, and in the same year, 1955, he created and headed the country's first Department of Thoracic Surgery for the improvement of doctors. Later, the first Department of Anesthesiology in Ukraine was spun off from it, which was established after the first anesthesiology courses in the country organized by Mykola Amosov. In 1958, Mykola Amosov was one of the first in the Soviet Union to integrate the method of artificial blood circulation into practice and began to cooperate with the Institute of Cybernetics in the field of physiological research of the heart.

In 1963, Mykola Amosov was the first in the USSR to perform mitral valve prosthetics, and in 1965 he created and was the first in the world to introduce antithrombotic prosthetic heart valves. Nikolai Mikhailovich Amosov created a number of new methods of surgical treatment of heart defects, original models of heart-lung machines.

From 1959 to 1990, Mykola Mykhailovych headed the Department of Biological Cybernetics at the Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was engaged in the research and design of artificial intelligence systems. Together with his colleagues at the Institute of Cybernetics, he created the world's first autonomous robots controlled by an artificial neural network.

Under the leadership of Amosov, fundamental research was conducted on the systems of self-regulation of the heart and the development of machine diagnostics of heart disease, the development and construction of a physiological model of the "internal environment of the body", modeling on computers of basic mental functions and some socio-psychological mechanisms of human behavior. The unconventional approach and original views of N.M. Amosov were widely recognized in our country and abroad. He was awarded the State Prize of Ukraine in 1978 and 1997 for his research in biocybernetics.

In 1983, the Heart Surgery Clinic headed by Amosov was reorganized into the Kyiv Research Institute of Heart Surgery. Every year, the Institute performs about 3000 heart surgeries, including about 2000 with cardiopulmonary bypass. The most important problems of cardiac surgery are being developed. Amosov was the first director of the Institute and since 1988 has been its honorary director.

The last years of life

In the summer of 1985, Nikolai Mikhailovich began to have heart problems. He needed a stimulator, but he refused to be put on it until hypertension developed. On the New Year's Eve, M. Amosov handed over the Institute to his deputy and went to Kaunas for surgery to J. Bredikus. The operation was successful, and by mid-February 1986, the surgeon had already returned to normal life.

However, M. Amosov did not hold on to the position of the Institute's director and in 1988 he resigned on his own initiative, but continued to operate once a week with the ASC. Only in 1992 did Nikolai Mikhailovich Amosov finally stop operating. Two months after the operation, the patient died of an infection, and the surgeon decided that he no longer wanted to operate, that his resource to bear the loss was exhausted.

In the winter of 1998, the great doctor's heart condition deteriorated. On May 29, 1998, M. Amosov was operated on for the second time by Professor Körfer in Bad Einhausen (Germany), where he had a biological aortic valve implanted and two coronary artery bypass grafts. After a successful surgery, M. Amosov returned home three weeks later.

In the spring of 2002, the great scientist suffered a stroke.

Until his last day, Mykola Mykhailovych led an active lifestyle.