Lifshits (Lifschitz) Fridman (Friedmann) Alexander (28 August 1883, Riga – 10 January 1980, Santiago, Chile) — physician, anthropologist.
A researcher in endocrinology, physiology, and also in the ethnography and history of the Indigenous peoples of Chile, Fridman Alexander Lifshits became one of the most significant ideologists of the Chilean left-wing movement.
He grew up in Riga. His father, Aaron Lifshits, was a lithographic technician; his mother, Frida Fridman, an artist. In 1901 he graduated from the Emperor Nicholas I Gymnasium in Riga and entered the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Berlin. In 1905 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolshevik faction). In March 1905 he interrupted his studies to take part in revolutionary activity in Riga; in 1906 he resumed them, first in Zurich, then in Göttingen, where he received his diploma in 1907. His thesis, Idiopathic Osteoporosis, was awarded a distinction.
From 1908 to 1912 he worked at the Institute of Comparative Physiology at the University of Göttingen under Professor Max Brauer, researching the physiology of the central nervous system as well as comparative physiology of the endocrine glands. In May 1914 he married Margarete Vogel-Lach (children: Marion (b. 1915), Justina (b. 1925)).
During the First World War he was a Privatdozent at the University of Bern. In 1916 he worked in the laboratory of Eugen Steinach. From 1916 to 1926 he was Professor of Physiology at the University of Dorpat (Tartu).
In 1926 Lifshits needed to leave to treat tuberculosis, and therefore accepted a professorship at the University of Concepción in Chile. He arrived in Chile in September 1926, organised and developed the local Institute of Physiology, and headed it until 1936. In 1927 he was appointed the first Dean of the new Faculty of Medicine at the University of Concepción and founded a biological scientific society — a branch of the French Biological Society. In 1934–35 he published in Madrid the textbook A Course in Practical Physiology.
At the end of 1939, due to disagreements with the university administration, he did not renew his contract and moved to Santiago, where — at the request of the Minister of Health Eduardo Kross Koch — he took charge of a research institute of the national health service. In 1941 he obtained Chilean citizenship. In 1943 he was ceremonially admitted, together with the poet Pablo Neruda, to the Chilean Communist Party.
In 1944 he received in the USA the Charles Leopold Mayer Award for achievements in cancer research. Lifshits’ studies of Indigenous cultures and the books he published influenced the ideology of the left-wing movement in its stance towards these populations. In 1946, on behalf of the Chilean government, he led an expedition to study the lives of the Indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego. In the preface to the book The Racial Problem in the Conquest of America and the Crossing of Races (Рroblema Racial en la Conquista de America y el Mestizaje), Pablo Neruda called him the most important man in Chile.
In 1970 Fridman Alexander Lifshits received the national prize for research in endocrinology and medicine. In 1972 he was elected an honorary member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences. He died in a Jewish care home. In 1983, after his death, a research institute bearing his name was founded.