THE MAN WHO DARED

Rem PETROV,
Vice-President USSR Academy of Sciences

For many years I have promised myself to write about that period between 1956 and 1960 which changed many lives in my country. Young biologists fresh from universities, myself included, keenly felt the contradictions animating science. In my student years (1948-1953) biology was dominated by Trofim Lysenko and his cronies. They had beaten genetics into non-existence and had badly distorted biology and biological courses at universities, medical, and agricultural colleges. We had been robbed of a solid education in genetics and biology. The cult of Stalin was exposed in 1956 yet Lysenko managed to worm his way into the confidence of our credulous leader, Nikita Khruschev. The new "official science" forced young researchers to choose between the status quo or, if they found the situation unbearable, to go out on their own.

Naturally, we jumped at the opportunity to learn from great geneticists. Few dared to oppose Lysenko and the establishment that stood solid behind him. Nikolay Timofeyev-Resovskiy (1900-1981) did dare. This is a tribute to his memory.

The mountainous figure of Timofeyev-Resovskiy, man and scientist, has risen to public attention thanks to Daniil Granin's novel The Bison. I here undertake the lesser task of telling how he liberated a whole generation from the tangled web of official education.

NIKOLAY TIMOFEYEV-RESOVSKIY WAS NOT ONLY A GREAT GENETICIST AND TEACHER, BUT THE MAN WHO LIBERATED A WHOLE GENERATION FROM THE TANGLED WEB OF "OFFICIAL SCIENCE"

"A sturgeon can produce only another sturgeon." It is with this truism that Timofeyev-Resovskiy opened his first lecture on genetics at the Bolshoye Miassovo biological station in the Urals, in the summer 1959, and then invited us to verify it with the help of fruit flies.

What urged him to teach? What urged us in turn to spend our annual leaves in Bolshoye Miassovo? It was both his desire to share knowledge with everyone who cared to learn and his mission to set right the young men disoriented by the official doctrines. I am also reminded of another famous Timofeyev-Resovskiy's statement: "The main thing is to separate things of primary and secondary importance and, fifthly, to understand why they are important."

I was often tempted to ask him what he meant by this but I had learned to accept that no explanation was needed. This was his own peculiar way of stating facts in a vivid and memorable manner.

Why, for example, did he used the sturgeon to illustrate a basic postulate of genetics? After all, any animal, plant, microbe, would have done just as well. He was a great teacher and expressed himself in vivid images and made aphoristic statements. A rare ancient species produced nothing but itself: it was unable to change its genes even under the penalty of extinction. His whole life was guided by the unbreakable rule that one must distinguish between the crucial and the irrelevant, and that one should always be aware of consequences, "firstly, secondly and: fifthly."

My interest in genetics and my urge to know more were first kindled by Volodya Korogodin, a junior staff member of the department of biophysics at Moscow University. In 1957-1958 I held a similar position in the laboratory of radiobiology at the Institute of Biophysics, USSR Ministry of Public Health. We were invited to comment on a paper dealing with the effect of radiation on erythrocytes (red blood cells). We all agreed that it was a sound paper. I analyzed the mechanism of erythrocytes hemolysis while he believed that the specific effects were due to erythrocytes being deprived of nuclear material, thus preventing the genes from multiplying. The discussion that followed laid bare my ignorance of basic genetics. It was clear that I was the victim of an educational conspiracy. I had graduated from the Voronezh Medical College where I was taught that there are no genes and that genetics is nothing more than an imperialist instrument. "Would you like to have a look at a fruit fly? We have a line with Vermilia mutation in our laboratory," he suggested. I jumped at the invitation as if it were a "forbidden fruit."

This was a period when Soviet biophysicists and radio-biologists competed in denigrating the theory of the target as the basis of ionizing radiation's biological impact. While I was looking through a microscope at a fruit fly it occurred to me that damage done to different molecules in a cell would produce different effects. I remarked that even if a dozen molecules were removed from a million identical molecules there would be no damage done, while if a single unique structure was removed there might be a deadly result.

"You are simplifying things but on the whole you are right," said Korogodin. "Bear in mind that genes are unique macromolecules. This clarifies Timofeyev-Resovskiy's trefer-principle and explains why most cells do not perish immediately after radiation, but degenerate following division or attempts to multiply. In fact, this is a meeting place of radiobiology and genetics that you can't reach without working with fruit flies. Practical work is indispensable if you want to probe deep into the laws of genetics, the concepts of dominance, recession, mutation, aberration and other "chromosomal intemperances," as Timofeyev-Resovskiy put it."

"Where can I get this practice?"

"There is only one place-in the Urals with Timofeyev-Resovskiy." Misha Shalnov and Volodya Benevolenskiy, my colleagues from the Institute, joined me in writing to the biological station. Volodya Korogodin produced a letter of recommendation. In due time an invitation followed.

Having arrived at the Miass railway station we called at the small office of the Miassovo reserve (not closed down by Khruschev's toadies only because it had been set up by Lenin himself). We spent two days and nights at the station waiting for a lorry that went our way.

It was Timofeyev-Resovskiy himself and his wife who met us: the lorry brought the long-awaited equipment for hydrobiological research.

We were greeted by his booming voice: "Glad to see you. We have readied a spot for your tent. Put it up. Here is a long street of them. Give your foodstuffs to Tanya and Galya, the biologists from Leningrad, who are in charge of cooking. In the evening we shall be glad to see you in our house."

It seemed that the three of us were totally ignorant of genetics: others, who had undoubtedly suffered at the hands of lecturers of biological departments and medical colleges, had been influenced by "unreliable" or maverick biologists in Leningrad and Moscow. Voronezh, like other smaller provincial towns, was wholly controlled by the Party Committee: every lecture on biology was monitored by a representative from the Regional Party Committee. Blyakher's textbook was removed from the libraries and taken away from students.

I believe that everyone has at least once felt inadequate because of a lack of knowledge of elementary things. I made great efforts to overcome this feeling: I knew that here was my only chance to sort things out, to separate the important from the unimportant, and to escape the effects of ten years of brainwashing. I never retreated until everything was absolutely clear and my teacher responded with equal enthusiasm, he was ready to answer all my questions, even the silly ones: "Can a recessive gene be dominant in relation to mote recessive ones? How should we treat the theory of the origin of life out of protein coacervate droplets?" - and other nonsense.

I was sure he would have hated my stupid persistence. Yet, he seemed to like it and even began calling me by diminutive name, a habit that survived until his death in 1981.

His answer to my question about the origins of life triggered a long chain of thought. First he said jokingly that no one, except Academician Oparin, knew the answer. I insisted. At this point my teacher formulated the thought that remained with me forever: "being materialists," he said, "we are very much concerned with the origins of life. For some strange reason, practically no one wants to know how matter came into being. The answer seems clear enough: matter is eternal. Why should life have origins. Probably there is no beginning and no end to the existence of life."

Timofeyev-Resovskiy was interested in everything, including my research at the Institute of Biophysics. I described how Larisa Ilyina and I had studied the effect of gamma-irradiation on the anti-genetic properties of tissues. In 1955 we made our observation public and launched a series of experiments designed to answer snow-balling questions. We had found the tissues most probe to changes, separated cell suspensions into fractions - citoplasmatic, microsomal and nuclear to borrow the terms from that time - and established whether new anti-genes appeared or normal genes disappeared where the changes were the greatest. To establish whether the correlation of amino acids in proteins synthesized after irradiation changed we introduced into animals two amino acids with different tags. At that time we had not yet reached the problem of the genetic control of immunity. This occurred to us only after my stay in Miassovo. Evidently, Timofeyev-Resovskiy found it interesting and invited me to deliver a paper. All of us attended it. The conference had nothing to do with the academies of sciences, ministries and other official bodies. It was organized by the "left" - biologists, biophysicists, geneticists and mathematicians. As far as I remember I was the only doctor, my friends were physicists and biologists.

Many people came to the conference including the Luchnik, Tsarapkin, Titlyanova, Tyuryukanov, Lyapunov, Berg, Efroimson, Volkenstein, Malenkov, Bresler, Kerkes, Tumerman.

Owing to the fine August weather the conference was held outdoors. Never again did I experience the same friendly and creative atmosphere. Everyone spoke about his own subject yet everyone was interested and took an active part in discussions. They were highly educated people who were trying hard to preserve genetics in the country and re-establish it to its former glory. Strictly speaking the conference was illegal discussing the subject that had been banned, Lysenko and his pseudoscientific theories dominated official science. It felt unreal taking part in a discussion of the paper by Lyapunov and Malenkov on mathematization of formal genetics, Efroimson's paper on the molecular foundations of hereditary diseases or Volkenstein's paper on the biophysics of nucleic acids. Papers were not the ultimate aim; people came to discuss various topics, to listen to criticism audio hear suggestions. My paper generated new research ideas: how to approach the role of the genes in immunity and what animals to select for these experiments. The conference found it interesting that some of my experiments involved genetically pure lines - it was natural since I governed myself with the logic of immunity.

It was at this conference that immunology and genetics began to blend into one science in my head. This was the most important result of my studies under Timofeyev-Resovskiy and of the conference. Biophysicists, radiobiologists, immunologists, doctors, mathematicians and physicists engaged in biological research recognized genetics as the common denominator of all biological disciplines. After all, the most difficult task is to distinguish between the important and not so important things and, fifthly, to understand why they are important...