Discoverer of chemical mutagenesis, expelled from the party for defending genetics to the end at the 1948 Agricultural Academy session
Born to a Jewish doctor's family in Chernihiv, he trained in genetics at Leningrad University and Koltsov's institute. He volunteered in the war with Germany, fought as a battalion commander and divisional operations officer, lost his left eye in Hungary in 1944, and joined the party at the front in 1943. After the war his experiments on fruit flies found chemicals with strong mutagenic effects, opening the study of chemical mutagenesis. At the August 1948 session of the Agricultural Academy he defended genetics as a science and refused to the end to accept its decision; expelled from the party in 1949, he worked on geological expeditions until 1957. Back in research at the Institute of Chemical Physics from 1957, he received the Lenin Prize in 1984 and was killed in a traffic accident in 1990.
Also known as: Joseph Rapoport
Activities and affiliations
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1941–1945
Soviet Union state institutionsRed Army battalion commander; chief of operations, 7th Guards Airborne Division
Military command -
1943–1949
Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks
Science and technology -
1957–1990
Soviet Union state institutionsChemical genetics department, Institute of Chemical PhysicsMain
Science and technology
Career Timeline
- 1930Entered the Faculty of Biology, Leningrad University
- 1938Completed graduate study at Koltsov’s Institute of Experimental Biology
- 1941–1945Volunteer at the front: Southern, Transcaucasian, Voronezh and 2nd Ukrainian Fronts
- 1943Defended his doctorate; joined the party at the front
- 1944Lost his left eye at Székesfehérvár
- 1948Defended genetics at the August session of VASKhNIL
- 1949Expelled from the party
- 1949–1957Palaeontology and stratigraphy on oil and geological expeditions
- 1955Signed the Letter of Three Hundred
- 1957Returned to genetics at the Institute of Chemical Physics
- 1979Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1984Lenin Prize
- 1990Hero of Socialist Labour; killed in a traffic accident