Origins and early career Born in
Șurănești,
Vaslui County, his parents Maria and Toader were poor
răzeși, peasants who owned their own plot of land. The family was related to
Emil Condurachi, future historian and archeologist. Grigore, the couple's eleventh child, was intellectually precocious. His mother noticed his aptitude early on, and despite great material difficulties, including selling off their land so he could finish high school, his parents managed to provide him with an education. Raised a
Romanian Orthodox, Popa blended his belief in core Christian principles with an interest in science. At the age of fifteen, he translated
Ernst Haeckel's
General Morphology into Romanian and obtained the author's written permission to publish. Popa graduated from the
National College in
Iași and entered the Natural Sciences faculty of
the local university. However, as his parents had no more money for his schooling and there were no scholarships left, he switched to the Medical faculty, where there was one scholarship, even though the field did not attract him. During
World War I, Popa cared for the wounded and sick at Iași's
Sfântul Spiridon Hospital, earning him a knighthood in the
Order of the Crown. Late in 1918, Popa also joined
A. C. Cuza's regionalist group for
Moldavian intellectuals—the Brotherhood of Unified Moldavia. Leading the Brotherhood's student center, he spoke in public about the
United Principalities' 60th anniversary, expressing his sadness that this had not been celebrated as a national holiday in Iași. In July 1918, he married Florica Cernătescu, a university classmate. A native of
Huși, her maternal grandfather was the chemist
Petru Poni. and herself a decorated wartime physician, Popa eventually followed Rainer to the
University of Bucharest's medical faculty in 1920, and was appointed assistant professor. Over the course of his career, his students included some twenty-two university professors and
Romanian Academy members, among them
George Emil Palade and
Constantin Bălăceanu-Stolnici.
Rise to prominence By January 1924, when Rainer's alleged
Jewish extraction made him a target of
antisemitic agitation among the students, Popa became Rainer's voice in professional disputes. As such, he accused a Iași anatomist,
Victor Papilian, of plagiarism, and published his take on the matter in the Bucharest daily
Adevărul. Papilian retorted with accusations of sectarianism against Popa, Rainer, and the whole "Bucharest school": "a sterile and envious school", "a grand society of mutual admirers, wherein master and students have declared each other geniuses". Popa identified Iași with extreme
nationalism, and, in a 1925 article for the student review
Viața Universitară, accused the far-right
National-Christian Defense League of hypocrisy. As he noted, its "hatred and brutality" were not just aimed at Jews, but also at Romanians coming in from
Bessarabia, since the latter were ostensibly socialists. With Rainer's help, Popa received a
Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1925. He had a direct experience of America, and of what he liked to call its "
guided democracy", which was rare among Romanians of his generation, and which he recorded in detail in diaries he intended for publishing. and the
physiology of spontaneous movement (
motility) in
spermatozoa. Regarding the first area, he worked in
London alongside the
Australian
Una Fielding; together they discovered the vascular link between the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, publishing their findings on the
hypophyseal portal system in medical journals between 1930 and 1935, presenting them before the
Royal Medical Society in 1935. Working alongside his Romanian colleague, Eugen Lucinescu, Popa also returned to anatomy with a study on the "mechanostructure" of the
pericardium. In 1928, Popa became professor of anatomy at Iași, the city associated with his rivals. For many years he taught histology, Anatomical Pathology and Legal Medicine, as required, and was also curator of
Sfântul Spiridon Hospital, as well as head of the Physicians and Naturalists' Society. With time, Popa became a noted public speaker in support of modernization, and a popularizer of Western science. In 1931, he gave a public lecture on "The Former and Current Situation of Iași", which recognized that the city had greatly decayed, materially and culturally, since 1866. He attributed this decline to psychological factors (a city with "depressed", "disinterested" and "filthy" inhabitants), but also to
clientelism and the excessive powers of the central government. On
Washington's Birthday, 1932, he discussed "The Scientific Spirit in America and in Europe" at the Friends of America society in Bucharest. An admirer of the British educational model, he was a
research fellow at the
University of Cambridge for four to six months a year in 1927–1930, 1932 and 1935–1938. Grigore T. Popa was Dean of the Iași medical faculty for two years, from 1938 to 1940. According to a popular account that Popa repeatedly challenged, Rainer had claimed the discovery of the hypophyseal portal system some years before Popa and Fielding.
Antifascism In January 1936, together with writers
Mihail Sadoveanu,
George Topîrceanu and
Mihai Codreanu, Popa founded
Însemnări Ieșene ("Recordings from Iași"), a magazine of commentary. With his intercession, the original group grew to include other intellectuals, including philosopher
Ion Petrovici and physician-novelist
I. I. Mironescu. He also used the magazine to popularize the
anthropological work of his former teacher, Elliott Smith.
Însemnări Ieșene ran for four years, coinciding with the peak of political turmoil. It borrowed inspiration from
Viața Românească, Romania's classical tribune of
social criticism, with Popa joining in the trend. As argued in 2012 by author Constantin Coroiu, Popa expanded the magazine's focus beyond cultural matters: "He takes up issues, analyses and criticizes mindsets, mores, inertia, cowardice, grave failures of character, and, what's more, the scourges of Romanian, and even European, society in his own day and ever since." As noted by Boia, Popa took "moderately left-wing positions and [was] persistent in his defense of democracy." According to his student Bălăceanu-Stolnici, he had "a left-wing orientation of the
British Labourite kind". Although active in such civil society causes, he was never a member of a political party, He decried the
new authoritarian Constitution as an act of capitulation to "political militancy and cultural inferiority", even as his colleagues in the literary world had come to endorse it. He combined
Herbert Spencer's take on
sociocultural evolution with a measure of
genetic determinism, and, against
psychological nativism, suggested that all concept of morality was produced by and through evolution; he also held that
primitive society, and "semi-civilized" fascism, were regulated by the
brainstem, whereas civilization was a realm of the
cerebral cortex. When, in 1940, Popa contributed to the FRN regime's magazine,
Muncă și Voe Bună, it was to highlight its contribution to
working class welfare. In October 1939—shortly after the
Invasion of Poland and the start of
World War II—,
Însemnări Ieșene published his article deploring man's return to his "beastly" nature and expressing fears that modern life had made soldiers indifferent about
transcendentals. Popa witnessed subsequent developments from the side. The National Renaissance Front fell from power after agreeing to territorial losses in favor of
Hungary and the
Soviet Union. He was part of the Grand Caucus of the university, which issued a reserved protest against the cession of
Northern Transylvania. With a special issue and articles in
Însemnări Ieșene, Popa also mourned the
loss of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Harassed by the Iron Guard, which blacklisted him for assassination, Popa managed to survive its "
National Legionary State" regime, proclaimed in September 1940. However,
Însemnări Ieșene was banned, A Iași medical faculty purging commission, headed by Iron Guard men, proposed Popa's transfer "to another scientific institution", citing Popa's "left-wing ideas" as a rationale. He continued to speak his mind, in particular objecting to Romania's participation in World War II alongside
Nazi Germany. He was, as Boia notes, "an intransigent antifascist, [who] would naturally fit into any sort of plot against the regime". In 1942, following Rainer's retirement, he was transferred to Bucharest, where he worked as a professor for four years. After Rainer's death in 1944, he also took over the Anthropological Institute and reattached it to the medical school. While there, Popa wrote a study showing the lack of any scientific basis for
Aryanism and asserting that there was no reason to oppress Jews.
Traian Săvulescu, afraid to offend Antonescu, refused to publish it; Popa nevertheless read the work before the academy in late 1943. The listeners, few of whom were pro-German, reacted positively. By that time, the security service,
Siguranța Statului, was keeping Popa under constant surveillance. In April 1944, together with other prominent intellectuals, Popa signed a petition asking Antonescu to seek peace with the
Allies and end the war immediately. As noted by Boia, this "academics' memorandum" was belated, and did not expose its signers to any special persecution, since the
Red Army was already poised to
invade Romania. Its paternity was for long disputed between the semi-active National Peasants' Party, who relied on Popa's friendliness, and the repressed
Romanian Communist Party. According to the National Peasantist version of the events, the text had been drafted as early as 1943 by Popa and
Ioan Hudiță, and only presented to the communists for signing. Nevertheless, both versions agree that Popa had a fundamental role in the secret negotiations between centrists and communists. he was Dean of the Bucharest medical faculty, having been handpicked for the position by
Ștefan Voitec, the
Social Democrat Education Minister. With the onset of the
Soviet occupation and the installation of a Communist Party-led government, he continued to stand up for his principles. In front of communist-run purging committees, he defended on professional grounds those colleagues accused of having sided with fascism, and called for the reinstatement of
academic freedom. In January 1945,
Democrația, a
liberal democratic daily, published
Ion Biberi's interview with Popa, where the latter voices the opinion that a truly democratic regime "cannot be tolerant of any form of extremism". His uncompromising stance stunned members of the
Petru Groza cabinet, in particular Voitec. At a conference in 1945, he praised the British and American university systems, drawing a vehement letter of rebuke from
Constantin Ion Parhon, who considered the Soviet model as optimal. As noted in 2009 by historian Bogdan Cristian Iacob, Popa's stance showed "a glaring lack of sense for the times", "an incapacity to grasp that the Academy and University were not, at least initially, attacked on the basis of the scholarship produced, but from political positions." According to Iacob, Popa was callous in not showing a willingness to indict those of his medical school colleagues who had careers in the Iron Guard. Following his clash with Parhon, Popa took the even more drastic step of resigning from the
Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union. Also in 1945, he began aiding
Constant Tonegaru's "
Mihai Eminescu Society", a
secret opposition group that distributed appeals for help to the West. He used his dean's cabinet as a storage room for such anticommunist propaganda. During this period, he was attacked and robbed by a group of three Soviet soldiers, which he interpreted as a warning. Popa's final public appearance took the form of a speech before the academy in April 1947. From an unassuming title, which implied a lecture about "nervous tension and the century's disease", Terror was inevitable, but ultimately inefficient: dictators [...] shall always be powerlessly arrested on the edge of our meditative nervous network, which they cannot control and cannot deform. There, in his own cortex, man still endures free [...]. But if, in order to make sure that they have expunged it, dictators should crucify [their victims], then the spirit, with its invisible vibrations, shall make its way from the crucified to the still-chained, and the miracle of a new resurrection will become possible, the resurrection of freedom, without which humanity would become extinct. Popa returned to his ideas on "semi-civilization", describing revolution as an enemy of
natural selection, in either its
Darwinian or
Lamarckism (Popa favored neither of the latter theories, viewing them as compatible). With "racism", "
historical materialism" was "a dangerous simplification" of human endeavor. He warned that communism, like Nazism, was going to "exterminate, propagating hatred and violence toward any belief but its own." His was also an appeal against immoral but "exact" science, describing ideologues as "disciples of the
Antichrist": "In this grave situation, the time has come for any conscience that is still pure to ask themselves: 'Where to?' And the answer will not be hard to find: 'Back to Christian morality!'". According to political scientist
Ioan Stanomir, this sample of "
Christian democracy" managed to reconcile the political expression of Romanian Orthodoxy, previously monopolized by the far-right, with "political freedom, understood as a set of guarantees against ideological and administrative arbitrariness." As argued by Stanomir, Popa "spoke out inadmissible truths and gave value appraisals to a regime that was just getting ready to impose
Stalinist orthodoxy upon the intellectuals. [...] The coming world had discovered a witness that would not hesitate to diagnose it." from the deanship and, in 1946, from teaching. This was accomplished with a novel procedure, which formally eliminated ("compressed") the teaching position, but also singled out the person in charge for further inquiry. One individual who fought to force Popa out of teaching was
Simion Oeriu, a communist without scientific training who was nonetheless appointed professor against Popa's objections. Another means used to target him was a proposal to admit hundreds of students who had been victims of Nazi oppression in Northern Transylvania, some of whom spoke no Romanian, and award them doctorates in two or three years. The primary school in his native village was also renamed in his honor in 2011. Popa's writings on science, culture and ideology were published by his descendants as
Reforma Spiritului ("Spiritual Reform") in 2002. Other essays were collected by physician Richard Constantinescu in a 2008 volume of works by and about
Ion Petrovici. This is one of several monographs and anthologies edited by Constantinescu, detailing such topics as Popa's Christian faith and his correspondence with poet-physician
Vintilă Ciocâlteu, and including his American diary (published 2014). Popa's widow was obligated to live in a tiny apartment on the outskirts of Bucharest; she died in 1986, in her mid-90s. One of the couple's sons, Grigore Gr., himself became a doctor, while the other,
Tudorel, was an actor. As youngsters, Tudorel Popa and his sister Marilena were both involved with their father in aiding the anticommunist underground. Tudorel Popa's son, Vlad Tudor Popa, is a chemist, head of the Romanian Academy's Institute of Physical Chemistry. Grigore Gr. died in 2006; his son is the novelist and critic
Dumitru Radu Popa. ==Notes==