Ivan Solomonovich Beritashvili, also I. Beritov (ივანე ბერიტაშვილი in Georgian, Иван Соломонович Бериташвили (Беритов) in Russian. Dec. 29, 1884 (Jan. 10, 1885)- 1974) was one of the great Soviet, Russian and Georgian, physiologists, one of the founders of the modern biobehavioral science. [1] He was a founder and director of a school of physiology in Georgia; academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1939), of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR (1944), of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR (1941). In 1964 Beritashvili received Hero of Socialist Labor award. [2]
Beritashvili graduated from St. Petersburg University and worked under the supervision of Nikolay Wedensky. He founded the Department of Physiology and the Institute of Physiology at the University of Tbilisi, Georgia. Beritashvili's most significant contribution was the discovery of the mediation of animal psychoneural behavior by image-driven memory, as well as the discovery of the rhythmical course of reciprocal inhibition in spinal reflexes, the first demonstration of the excitatory and inhibitory reactions in the brain stem neuropil and many others.[3]