Academy president who founded organoelement chemistry
When Malenkov offered him the Academy presidency, Nesmeyanov listed his vegetarianism, his arrested brother, his Party card — reasons to refuse. Malenkov dismissed every one: the matter was already decided.
Nesmeyanov was a world authority on organometallic chemistry who developed the diazo method, known as the 'Nesmeyanov reaction', and founded the new discipline of organoelement chemistry. As rector of Moscow University (1948–1951) he oversaw construction of the iconic Lenin Hills campus. After S. I. Vavilov's death in 1951 he became President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, steering Soviet basic research for a decade through the acceleration of the nuclear and space programmes. After stepping down in 1961, he turned to synthetic food research, developing processes to produce artificial black caviar. To the end of his life he remained an institution-builder at the centre of Soviet science.
Career Timeline
- 1939–1954Director, Institute of Organic Chemistry, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1943Full member (Academician), Chemical Sciences, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1946–1951Academician-Secretary, Chemical Sciences, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1948–1951Rector, Moscow State University
- 1951–1961President, USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1954–1980Founder and Director, Institute of Organoelement Compounds (INEOS)
- 1950–1962Deputy, Supreme Soviet of the USSR
Synthetic Food: From Black Caviar to a Food Revolution
After stepping down from the Academy presidency in 1961, Nesmeyanov pivoted to an entirely new research direction: producing food by chemical synthesis, bypassing agriculture altogether. The idea drew inspiration from the pioneering work of Mendeleev and Berthelot and was pursued at the Institute of Organoelement Compounds (INEOS), which he had founded. The core aim was to develop processes that could replicate the appearance, taste, smell, colour, and texture of natural food so faithfully as to be indistinguishable from it.
The most famous result was artificial black caviar. Built on a protein base extracted from fish roe and encapsulated in gelatin to mimic the texture and colour of natural caviar, it became the world's first commercial protein-analogue food product. Other processes developed under his direction included new forms of potato products, pasta and grain derivatives, and combined meat products blending plant and animal proteins.
Nesmeyanov regarded this work not as an engineering curiosity but as a fundamental solution to humanity's food problem. In his 1965 monograph The Problem of Food Synthesis, he framed artificial food as a long-term strategy for environmental conservation, efficient land use, and a growing global population. A distant forerunner of today's alternative meats, cultured proteins, and food engineering, his radical vision took half a century to become mainstream food science.