Bioplasma

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.

Independent investigation of the Kirlian effect, carried out by researchers outside the original Soviet program from the 1970s onward, found that the coronal discharge captured on film could be reliably reproduced and altered by manipulating entirely ordinary physical variables, moisture content, pressure applied to the electrode, electrical grounding, and the voltage and frequency of the field itself, without any need to posit a life-specific bioplasmic energy to account for the images, a conclusion summarized in skeptical reference works such as Robert Todd Carroll's The Skeptic's Dictionary. Because these physical variables alone could account for the corona's appearance and its variation between living and even non-living or freshly cut biological samples, mainstream biophysics did not adopt bioplasma as a genuine fifth state of matter, and the theory has not been supported by controlled research conducted since the 1970s and 1980s reassessment of Kirlian photography.

Bioplasma's imagery and vocabulary nonetheless persisted well beyond the scientific reassessment, feeding into later Western popular writing on the human aura and energy healing in ways that echo, and were sometimes directly cited alongside, the older Theosophical etheric and astral concepts and Reichenbach's nineteenth century od, part of a recurring pattern in which a scientifically framed claim about a life-specific energy field, once its physical explanation is established, continues to circulate in popular and alternative-healing culture regardless. Bioplasma is presented here as a documented Soviet-era research program and the specific test result that followed it, not as an open scientific question.