Nikolay Nikolayevich Anichkov (Russian: Никола́й Никола́евич Ани́чков, often spelled Anitschkow in German literature) (1885, Saint Petersburg – 1964) was a prominent pathologist of Russian heritage. Anichkov first described the specialized myocardial cells (Anitschkow cell, cardiac histiocyte) and discovered the significance and role of cholesterol in atherosclerosis pathogenesis. In 1958, in an editorial in Annals of Internal Medicine, William Dock compared the significance of the classic work of Anichkov to that of the discovery of the tubercle bacillus by Robert Koch. American biochemist D. Steinberg wrote: "If the full significance of his findings had been appreciated at the time, we might have saved more than 30 years in the long struggle to settle the cholesterol controversy and Anit