Nikolay Vladimirovich Timofeev-Ressovsky (; – 28 March 1981) was a Soviet biologist who, in principle, was a senior scientist in Soviet programs of nuclear and, later in biological weapons. He conducted research in radiation genetics, experimental population genetics, and microevolution. His life was highlighted by scientific achievements in the face of severe personal hardship, including his imprisonment and working in secret scientific facilities of Soviet Gulag.
Timofeev-Ressovsky was a descendant of the old Russian school of scientists, characterised by broad naturalistic views on the world, simultaneously combined with exact analysis of causes and consequences and establishment of elementary phenomena. He widely collaborated with physicists. Known for his influential personality, he was a talented story-teller and teacher.Vorontsov, N.N. Raznolikii Timofeev-Ressovsky. Priroda, 10: 90-105 (1995) [Diverse Timofeev-Ressovsky] (in Russian) He is the author of the term 'genetic engineering'.
Education Nikolaj Vladimirovich Timofeev-Resovski,”Николай Владимирович Тимофеев-Ресовский” transliterated, from a one-to-one American English convention on the Cyrillic alphabet, becomes “Nikolaj Vladimirovich Timofeev-Resovskij”. began his university education from 1916 to 1917 at the Moscow City People's University named after A. L. Shanyavskij. From 1917 to 1922, he studied at the First Moscow State University.Ivanov and Liapunova, 1990, not paginated; see also N. V. Timofeev-Resovskij Kratkaya Avtobiograficheskaya Zapiska (Brief Autobiographical Note) not paginated .
The First World War and the consequences of the Russian Revolution of 1917 interrupted his education for periods of time. At the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, Timofeev-Resovskij was a follower of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin. In 1918, he volunteered to serve in a small anarchist cavalry unit, which was part of the Green army, i.e., they were neither supporters of the Bolshevik Red army nor the White army of General Anton Ivanovich Denikin. Eventually, in 1919, the anarchists joined the Red army. As a private in the 12th Red Army, Timofeev-Resovskij took part in the last battle of the Civil War in the Crimea on the Polish front.Medvedev, 1982, no pagination.Ratner, 2001.
A paper trail of his education was swept away in the chaos of war. Timofeev-Resovskij abandoned his education without a scientific degree; he left formal education with only a gold medal. Even though he eventually became a recognized world-class scientist, he would later, as a requirement for employment, be required to complete his doctorate. He defended his doctoral dissertation in 1963 in Sverdlovsk, and he was awarded a Doctor of Science diploma in 1964.
Career
In Russia
During the period 1920 to 1925, Timofeev-Resovskij was an instructor and researcher in Moscow. It was in this period that he met and married Elena Aleksandrovana Fidler (1898 – 1973), who was a student of the cytologist and biologist Nikolaj Konstantinovich Kol’tsov in Moscow; Elena became not only Timofeev-Resovskij's lifelong devoted companion but also his lifelong partner in research. Their eldest son, Dmitrij, was born on 11 September 1923.Vogt, 1998, 17.
From 1920 to 1925, Timofeev-Resovskij was a biology instructor in the pre-Chekist district primary school in Moscow. From 1922 to 1925, he was a zoology instructor on the biotechnical faculty of the Moscow Practical (Applied) Institute. From 1921 to 1925, he did research at the Institute of Experimental Biology, of the Gosudarstvennyj Institut Narodnogo Zdravookhraneniya (GINZ, State Institute of Public Health), under the directorship of N. K. Kol’tsov. Some of his research at the Institute involved Drosophila. It was in a department headed by Sergei Sergeevich Chetverikov, the founder of population genetics and a colleague of Kol’tsov, that Timofeev-Resovskij started his genetics experiments. From 1924 to 1925, he was a research assistant in Kol’tsov's department of zoology at the Medical Pedagogical Institute in Moscow. In 1924, Timofeev-Resovskij began his publications in the field of phenogenetics.Medvedev, 1982, not paginated.
During the period 1923 to 1925, Oskar Vogt, an eminent psychiatrist and neurophysiologist, was a visiting scientist in Moscow; he was director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft’s Institut für Hirnforschung (KWIH, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research)Today, the KWIH is known as the Max-Planck Institut für Hirnforschung, MPIH . After World War II, all of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were named after the physicist Max Planck. in Berlin. In part, he was looking to recruit researchers for the KWIH, especially in the relatively new field of genetics. In 1924, the Soviet government made an exchange agreement with Germany. The KWIH was invited to establish a laboratory for brain research in Moscow, which it did: Институт Мозга (Institut Mozga, Institute of the Brain). To reciprocate, the Soviets promised to help set up an experimental laboratory for genetics at the KWIH. Vogt had good relations with Nikolaj Aleksandrovich Semashko, People's Commissioner (Minister) of Health. It was Semashko and Kol’tsov who suggested Timofeev-Resovskij to Vogt. Thus, in the summer of 1925, Timofeev-Resovskij, his wife Elena and his colleague Sergei Romanovich Tsarapkin (Zarapkin), left Russia for an unspecified period of time in Germany, which lasted 20 years.Vogt, 2998, 18.Solzhenitsyn, 1973 & 1974, 634.
In Germany (1925-1945)
Once at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Hirnforschung (KWIH Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research ), Vogt and Timofeev-Resovskij began implementing the other half of the scientific agreement with Russia. In 1929 Timofeev-Resovskij became director of the Abteilung für Experimentelle Genetik (Department of Experimental Genetics). In 1930, the KWIH moved to its new facility in Berlin-Buch, which was partly financed by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation."Biologists Under Hitler", Ute Deichmann, Thomas Dunlap. Harvard University Press, 1999. p. 117-118. , 9780674074057."Science, Technology, and National Socialism", Monika Renneberg, Mark Walker. Cambridge University Press, 2003. p. 175-176., . The KWIH, with its departments of Neuroanatomy (Oskar and Cécile Vogt), neurohistology (Alois Kronmüller), Neurochemistry (Marthe Vogt),For these times in the history of German culture, the KWIH had a considerable number of women scientists on its staff including Cécile Vogt (wife of Oskar Vogt), Marthe Vogt (daughter of Oskar and Cécile Vogt), Elena Aleksandrovana Timofeeva-Resovskaja (wife of Nikolaj Timofeev-Resovskij), Natasha (Natalie) Kromm, Imgard Lüx, Stella Rose, Rosa Schragenheim, Gertrud Söken, and Estera Tanenbaum. Also, under the Nazis, special considerations had to sometimes be made for a husband and wife being employed at the same facility, as they were concerned about double earnings (Doppelverdienertum). See Vogt, 1998, 17-20. Actually, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft and its institutes opened new avenues for women in the German culture of the 1920s and 1930s. See Ruth Lewin Sime From Exceptional Prominence to Prominent Exception: Lise Meitner at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry Volume 24 of the Forschungsprogramm „Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus“ (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, 2005) and Ruth Lewin Sime Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (University of California Press, 1996). and genetics (Nikolaij and Elena Timofeev-Resovskij), and its hospital, the KWIH was one of the largest and most modern research facilities of its kind in the entire world. The research conducted in the genetics department, along with the permanent seminar on genetics organized by Timofeev-Resovskij, drew many young postdoctoral researchers who would ultimately become prominent scientists and the department gained the status of an institute; while Timofeev-Resovskij remained a citizen of the Soviet Union for his entire stay in Germany, his status and that of his department were recognized by the fact that he was appointed, in 1938, to the position of scientific member of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft. Timofeev-Resovskij's colleagues in his department included his wife Elena Aleksandrovana Timofeeva-Resovskaja, his Russian colleague Sergei Tsarapkin, the physician and radiation biologist Alexander Catsch (Katsch), the radiochemist Hans-Joachim Born, and the physicist and radiation biologist Karl Zimmer; a technical assistant, Natasha (Natalie) Kromm, was from Russia. Timofeev-Resovskij also collaborated with other eminent scientists including the nuclear chemist Nikolaus Riehl, who was the scientific director of the industrial corporation Auergesellschaft and the biophysicist Max Delbrück, who had studied physics under Niels Bohr and Max Born. Others drawn to Timofeev-Resovskij's department who would go on to become prominent scientists included Hans Bauer and Andriano Buzzati-Traverso. Through 20 years of collaboration with these and many others, Timofeev-Resovskij authored or coauthored over 100 papers written in German, English, Russian, and French. In addition to those already mentioned, Timofeev-Resovskij's scientific circle included the physicists William Astbury, Niels Bohr, P. A. M. Dirac, Pascual Jordan, and Erwin Schrödinger, and the biologists Torbjörn Caspersson, C. D. Darlington, Theodosij Dobzhans’skij, Boris Ephrussi, Åke Gustafsson, J. B. S. Haldane, Hermann Joseph Muller, Nikolai Vavilov, and Vladimir Vernadsky.Riehl and Seitz, 1996, 25, 121-124.H. J. Born, N. W. Timoféeff-Ressovsky and K. G. Zimmer Biologische Anwendungen des Zählrohres, Naturwissenschaften Volume 30, Number 40, 600-603 (1942). The authors were identified as being in the genetics department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Buch.Macrakis, 1993, 47.Oskar Vogt: Mediziner Hirnforscher (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2002 ).Timofeev-Resovskij – MDC for Molecular Medicine: Background Information Nikolai Wladimirovich Timoféeff-Ressovsky.Vogt, 1998, 17-20.Preprint 329: Pascual Jordan (1902–1980) from the Mainzer Symposium zum 100. Geburtstag (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 2007).
Timofeev-Resovskij's second son was born on 9 April 1927.Vogt, 1998, 19.
Together with the French geneticist of Russian origin, Boris Ephrussi, and with the generous support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Timofeev-Resovskij organized an annual conference on biophysics, genetics, and radiation biology. This even continued right up to the start of World War II in 1939.
In 1932, Timofeev-Resovskij attended the 6th International Congress of Genetics, which was held in Ithaca, New York. While there, he formed a friendly relationship with the plant geneticist Nikolaj Vavilov, who was President of the Soviet Adcademy of Agricultural Sciences.
Timofeev-Resovskij stayed in Germany even after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. That the Gestapo or the Schutzstaffel (SS) did not give him trouble as a citizen of the Soviet Union is all the more remarkable since Vogt was harassed by the National Socialists for reasons which could have translated into trouble for Timofeev-Resovskij. On the evening of 15–16 March 1933, members of the Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers) raided Vogt's villa on the grounds of the KWIH. The action had been taken in response to a denunciation by M. H. Fischer, a physiologist at the Institute, who was seeking to rise in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, National Socialist Workers Party). The accusations against Vogt included making payments to the Communist Party, maintaining connections to Russia, tolerating Communist staff members, and dismissing National Socialist staff members.