Zhores Medvedev

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Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev (Russian: Жоре́с Алекса́ндрович Медве́дев; born 14 November 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia) is a Russian biologist, historian and dissident. His twin brother is the historian Roy Medvedev.

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[edit] Biography

Zhores Medvedev and his twin brother Roy Medvedev were born on 14 November 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR.

From 1926 until 1938, the Medvedev family lived in Leningrad. Medvedev's father, Aleksandr Romanovich Medvedev, was a professor of the Military-Political Academy with the military rank of brigade commissar. In August 1938, Aleksandr was arrested in the wave of political terror of the time and was charged as a "follower of Bukharin" and sentenced to eight years of forced labor. He died in March 1941 in one of the Kolyma Far Eastern camps. The rest of the family – Zhores, Roy and mother Yalia – moved to live in Rostov-on-Don. In September 1941, the family was evacuated to Tbilisi, shortly before the first German occupation of Rostov-on-Don.

In Tbilisi in February 1943, Medvedev was drafted to the Soviet Army and after training was sent as a foot soldier to the Taman front where he took part in fighting and was wounded and later discharged from the army. In 1944, Medvedev became a student of the K.A. Timiryazev Russian State Agricultural University. In December 1950 he was awarded a PhD degree (kandidat biologicheskikh nauk) for his research into sexual processes in plants. He was at first junior and from 1954 Senior research scientist of the agrochemistry and biochemistry department of the Timiryazev Academy until 1963.

In 1952 he turned his attention to the problems of aging, concentrating on the turnover of proteins and nucleic acids. In 1961 he published the first paper suggesting that aging is the result of an accumulation of errors in the synthesis of proteins and nucleic acids. In 1962, Medvedev wrote his book on the history of Soviet genetics (later published in the USA as "The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko", Columbia Univ. Press, 1969) which was widely circulated in a manuscript typewritten version known as "samizdat" ("self-publishing").

In 1963, Medvedev moved to Obninsk to the Institute of Medical Radiology, where he was appointed head of the molecular radiobiology laboratory. He published two books, Protein Biosynthesis and Problems of Heredity Development and Ageing (1963; English translation 1965 Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh) and Molecular Mechanisms of Development (1966; English translation 1968, Plenum Press, New York). Medvedev was dismissed from his position in 1969 after the publication in the USA of his book The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko.

Between 1968 and 1970, Medvedev wrote two more samizdat books: International Cooperation of Scientists and National Frontiers and Secrecy of Correspondence is Guaranteed by Law (about postal censorship in the USSR). They were published in 1971 as Medvedev Papers by Macmillan, London. These works were widely circulated in the USSR among scientists, and this activity resulted in Medvedev's arrest and forced detention in the Kaluga psychiatric hospital in May 1970. However, this action produced many protests from prominent scientists (Academics Andrei Sakharov, Pyotr Kapitsa, Igor Tamm, Vladimir Engelgardt, Boris Astaurov,[1] Nikolai Semyonov, and others) and well-known writers (Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky, Vladimir Tendryakov, Vladimir Dudintsev, etc.) which resulted in Medvedev's release (this experience was reflected in Zhores Medvedev's and Roy Medvedev's book A Question of Madness, published by Macmillan in London in 1971).

In 1971, Medvedev was given the job of Senior scientist of the Institute of Physiology and Biochemistry of Farm Animals in Borovsk, Kaluga region.

In 1972, Medvedev was invited for one year's research by the National Institute for Medical Research in London at its new Genetic Division. While in London with wife Margarita and younger son, Dmitry Zhoresevich, Medvedev was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and his passport was confiscated. He remained in London and was working as full-time Senior Research scientist at the National Institute for Medical Research until his retirement in 1991.

Medvedev published about 170 research papers and reviews, about 60 of them during his work in London. In 1980 Medvedev received British citizenship. In 1990 his Soviet citizenship was restored by decree of President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Medvedev received the Aging Research Award of US Association of Biogerontology in 1984 and the Rene Schubert Preis in Gerontology in 1985.

[edit] Career and dissent

Zhores Medvedev is famous for exposing the Kyshtym nuclear disaster, which occurred at Mayak near Kyshtym, Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast in the Urals in 1957. He published the book The Nuclear Disaster in the Urals in 1979 (W.W. Norton, New York).

Medvedev was one of the earliest victims of official attempts to stifle opposition by detaining dissidents in mental institutions. In London Medvedev continued to edit the samizdat journal XX Century jointly with his brother, Roy. The two also coauthored Khrushchev: The Years in Power (1978) and several other books, the last one The Unknown Stalin (2007).

He had two sons, the eldest of whom is deceased. The other, Dimitri, ran the Blue Bridge Café in Camden, London, before moving to Cornwall, where he owns a farm and has children, Tomas (1997) and Alice (2000).

[edit] References

  1. ^ "World: Protesting Spiritual Murder". Time. 29 June 1970. http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,878842,00.html. Retrieved 12 July 2011. 

[edit] Works

[edit] Articles

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