Zhores Medvedev Personal Details Name Zhores Medvedev Dates Born 14/11/1925 Place of Birth Georgia (USSR) Main work places Obinisk (USSR), London Principal field of work Radiation genetics Short biography See below Interview Recorded interview made Yes Interviewer Peter Harper Date of Interview 21/02/2006 Edited transcript available See below Personal Scientific Records Significant Record set exists Records catalogued Permanent place of archive Summary of archive Biography Zhores Medvedev was born in Tiflis, Georgia, then part of USSR and was brought up in Leningrad. After army service during the war he studied at Moscow Agricultural Academy and after obtaining his PhD in 1950 worked on problems of aging in relation to error accumulation in proteins and nucleic acids. In 1963 he was appointed head of the molecular radiobiology laboratory in Obninsk. His 1962 book ‘The Rise and Fall of TD Lysenko’ and subsequent books and ‘samizdat’ activities led to his arrest and psychiatric hospital detention in 1970, but he was released following protests by many eminent scientists. After coming to London for research at National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London in 1972, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. He remained at Mill Hill until retirement in 1991 and continues to live in London. His Russian citizenship was restored in 1900 by President Mikhail Gorbachev. His twin brother is Roy Medvedev, historian and activist. Interview with Dr Zhores Medvedev Tuesday 21 February 2006 at his home in Mill Hill, London. PSH. What I would like to do mostly, if it’s alright, is to concentrate on what you can tell me about Human and Medical Genetics in Russia. How it was first destroyed and then anything about how it was kept alive and then brought alive again, and I am very pleased to note that other people at the British Library have done a biographical interview. I won’t try to do that, but could you perhaps tell me what was it that first interested you to go into the field of science at the very beginning. ZM. I was interested in science since I was actually a teenager. The first books in biology I read when I was 13 or 14 years old, before the war. I was very impressed by a book by Academician Bogomoletz which was called Prolongation of Life, and it was published in 1938. So I became interested in this field and in 1940 I read a very impressive, large book, really not popular like that of Bogomoletz but a serious book, the problems of ageing and longevity by Nagorny, a Russian professor from Kharkov. So this developed my interest in this field, but for many different reasons, practical, during the war I was in the Army, I was wounded. In 1944, I was able to apply for higher education, and I considered to go to Moscow University for general biology. But I did find that Moscow University was kind of elite type of university and was very little chance, despite the fact that there were some privileges for war veterans etc. So I immediately started to feel they might consider me as not politically suitable, because my father was arrested and died in the camps, so I was in the group of so-called members of families of enemies of the people. PSH. May I ask, was your father a scientist or medical person? ZM. No, he was military. Here is his portrait here, on the top. He was in the Army. He was high ranking officer. He was arrested in 1938. There was a very serious purge in the Army during Stalin. PSH. I read that. ZM. You probably read about this. So he was a victim of this purge and I, as a member of the family, in Soviet time, during Stalin’s time, because of all this, where you go to university, school, job. You fill questionnaires which ask your biography. Who was your mother? Who was your father? etc etc. And in my case this was a kind of a liability. So I selected agricultural academy in Moscow. Quite old, and very, very good from the point of view of educational standards, and much better actually than university, I discovered later. And I selected the faculty of agrochemistry, so it gave me biochemical background into chemistry etc. University probably gave me more wide knowledge of histology, general biology, anatomy, all the things that were probably better. But agricultural academy in this faculty was alright. My wife graded from the same academy as well. So after this education, again I felt that I might not be accepted into the postgraduate or graduate student, again for political reasons. So I started research early with Professor Zhukovsky. Again he was in the middle, a botanist. He supported me very much. He suffered himself from Lysenko, and he did help me to get my degree quite quickly without any official graduate 3 years study. So I got my degree quite quickly. PSH. Before you did your research, the teaching in the agricultural academy, was there any teaching of classical genetics, or had it all been removed by that time? ZM. No there was classical genetics and Professor Zhebrak, it was essentially plant genetics, animal genetics as well. It was an official course of genetics. We were recommended textbook of Dobhzhansky, and Dobhzhansky was the kind of textbook on genetics before1946 approximately, 1947. And Zhebrak was an agricultural geneticist. He became well-known for his works on creation of polyploid wheat, polyploid crops. New crops. It was popular at the time. After1948, when Lysenko took over with his famous meeting of the . Zhebrak was dismissed and this department, or this chair of this course was given to Lysenko himself. So Lysenko became Professor of the Timiriazev Agricultural Academy and he started to teach genetics. It was Lysenko genetics, but I got through this course before Lysenko took over so, in my case I did study genetics as it was in Dobhzhansky book. PSH. Was Dobhzhansky’s book then written in Russian at that point? ZM. No it was translated. Dobhzhansky defected in America. I don’t know whether you know his story? PSH. I know it approximately. ZM. Dobhzhansky was a very bright young geneticist and at the beginning of the thirties or end of the twenties, Russia was more liberal and there was an exchange programme with the Americans and the Rockefeller foundation subsidised several young Russian geneticists to go to United States to study genetics. All of them, including Zhebrak, was there as well. Dobhzhansky decided that he does not want to return back, so he was considered as a traitor, etcetera etcetera during Stalin’s time. But nevertheless his textbook on genetics was considered the best in the thirties. I don’t know about later time. PSH. And did you study chromosomes, for instance? ZM. Yes I did. It was part of the actual first year in botany, so the plant cytology and botany was part, so we did study microscopes, all this preparation of meristems and plants in genetics, yes. The chromosomes were included, of course. PSH. To me that is interesting ZM. It was 1945/’46. It was a very long year so the course of botany, which was, the first year you studied the general discipline like botany, chemistry, organic chemistry inorganic chemistry etc etc, and the botany was practical and general botany, and the botany did include, this is my Professor Zhukovsky textbook. It is a later edition ‘Botanika’ and you find a lot of things here, structural yes, cytology is part of the . so you study all this meristem, cell division, chromosomes. PSH. Because this was quite a few years after the problems, say around 1937, when Levit and colleagues, a lot of persecution had already happened by then. ZM. Yes that’s right, but nobody yet considered chromosomes as something which was not linked to inheritance. In the 30s there were two fighting camps and each camp got his own base, institutions, laboratories. The total ban on classic genetics, including chromosomes, came only in 1948 after Lysenko took over and everything was forbidden. People stopped to consider chromosomes as part of the inheritance and the field became unpopular. But when I was a student of the first year and second year, I did study chromosomes, all this meiosis, mitosis and all the things linked to the inheritance. So polyploidy was a very popular field of research, so this was not forbidden. People were working in this field. PSH. You must have been one of the last people to be able to have a training before it became impossible. ZM . I don’t know. In medical science probably it was a complete ban, but in botanical science you can’t actually try, because this is descriptive science. It describes, cell division, how can you describe cell division without chromosomes or meiosis. So nobody tried to tell that meiosis doesn’t exist. PSH. Meiosis. ZM. So the descriptive part did remain in, let us say, in botany and plant physiology. In medical, I don’t know how in medical institutes they teach this field, because in medical descriptive, it includes probably meiosis as well. PSH. But I think in those years nobody really could work on human chromosomes still for another 10 years, because the techniques for looking at human chromosomes didn’t really – well I’m wrong there because in Russia they did exist actually and maybe that was going to be one of my questions which maybe I could ask at this point and this was that while in Western countries human cytogenetics only developed in the 1950s, in Russia in Levit’s Medical Genetics Institute there was very strong medical cytogenetics, with people like Andres, Navashin, and I was wondering whether you had any information on that group of people.