Old Bolshevik who had worked with Lenin, and biologist awarded a Stalin Prize for the claim that cells arise anew from “living substance”
Born to a wealthy family in Perm, she joined the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in 1894 and married Panteleimon Lepeshinsky, sharing his Siberian exile. She joined the RSDLP in 1898, sided with the Bolsheviks, and in Geneva exile ran a canteen that became the Bolsheviks' meeting place. She qualified in medicine in 1915 and turned to biology. Against Virchow's principle that cells come only from cells, she claimed that cells arise anew from structureless living substance; at the 1950 joint conference of the two academies every speaker, Lysenko included, backed her, and she received a Stalin Prize. She wrote that dialectical materialism had armed Michurin and Lysenko ideologically, and her theory, made compulsory in medical teaching, was later judged unscientific.
Also known as: Olga Protopopova
Activities and affiliations
-
1898–1903
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP)
Science and technology -
1903–1963
Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks
Science and technology -
1919–1963
Soviet Union state institutionsHead of the living-substance department, Institute of Experimental BiologyMain
Science and technology
Career Timeline
- 1894Joined the St Petersburg League of Struggle
- 1897Married Panteleimon Lepeshinsky; followed him into Yenisei exile
- 1898Joined the RSDLP
- 1903Exile in Geneva; ran the Bolshevik canteen
- 1915Graduated in medicine from Moscow University
- 1919Teaching and research in Tashkent, then Moscow
- 1926Histology laboratory, Timiryazev Biological Institute
- 1949Head of the department for the development of living substance
- 1950Joint conference of the two academies; Stalin Prize; full member of the Academy of Medical Sciences