The Soviet biophysicist Victor Inyushin, working at Kazakh State University from the 1950s onward, proposed that living organisms are permeated and surrounded by a bioplasmic energy field, composed of ions, free electrons and free protons, which he argued constituted a distinct, fifth state of matter alongside solid, liquid, gas and ionized plasma, specific to living systems. Inyushin held that a balance between positively and negatively charged particles within this field was necessary for health, and that measurable disruptions in that balance could underlie disease processes, extending the theory well beyond ordinary biophysics into claims touching healing and, in some Soviet parapsychological research of the period, extrasensory perception.
Inyushin's theory gained its widest popular association through Kirlian photography, a technique developed decades earlier by Semyon and Valentina Kirlian, in which an object placed on a photographic plate within a high-voltage electric field produces a glowing coronal discharge on the image; Inyushin and other Soviet researchers interpreted these coronas as direct photographic evidence of the bioplasmic field, a claim that traveled to the West substantially through the 1970 popular book Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. Bioplasma theory occupied an unusual position within Soviet science, receiving serious institutional research attention during the Cold War period in a way comparable Western fringe claims about vital energy rarely received from state institutions.