Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

In 1950, Academician Speransky was one of the main figures assisting the destruction of physiological science in the USSR. His psychological motivation may have been fear. All his life he was afraid it would be revealed that during the Civil War he had served as a doctor in the White Army of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. 143

Nikolai Grashchenkov (1901–1964) was a neuropathologist and neurophysiologist, as well as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and a member of the Medical Academy and the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. 144He joined the Bolshevik (Communist) Party in 1918 and was an ardent Communist ever after. Grashchenkov was the first to describe gas gangrene of the brain caused by a head wound infection. In 1935, he defended his doctorate thesis on epilepsy and immediately afterward went abroad for two years to work at medical schools in Cambridge, England, and New York, New Haven, and Boston. After this, he was appointed a deputy commissar of Narkomzdrav, USSR Health Ministry (1937–1939). From 1939 until 1944, he was director of VIEM, where Mairanovsky worked at the time he defended his thesis. In 1939, he was a member of the commission that dismissed an outstanding biologist, Professor Nikolai Koltsov, as director of the Institute of Experimental Biology, which Koltsov himself created in 1917. After this, Professor Koltsov died of a heart attack. 145Later, Grashchenkov was a director of the Institute of Neurology (1944–1948) in Belorussia and became president of the Belorussian Academy. In 1951, he returned to Moscow and for a long time served as head of the Neurology Department at the First Medical Institute. In the late 1940s to early 1950s, Grashchenkov was famous because of his numerous attacks in the press on “idealistic” geneticists and physiologists 146and his support of the pseudoscientific “experiments” of Lysenkoists. 147

Evidently, both Speransky and Grashchenkov were good professionals and high-level Soviet medical officials who did not care about the true nature of Mairanovsky’s “objects.” Moreover, Grashchenkov, being deputy minister and head of the VIEM, definitely knew about Mairanovsky’s experiments.

Another medical academician, Vladimir Sanotsky, seems to have been the most important expert in terms of Mairanovsky’s “experiments.” Sanotsky, a corresponding member and later a full member of the Academy of Sciences, was a prominent Soviet toxicologist. 148From 1934 until 1952, he worked at the Institute of Pathology and Therapy of Intoxication and was for many years a director there. Later, he headed the Toxicology Department at the Veterinary Academy in Moscow and at the same time worked at the Institute of Medical Final Courses. He was a specialist on the action of chemical weapons. As the Great Medical Encyclopedia describes him, beginning in 1925, “Sanotsky studied the mechanism of action of some toxic compounds [on humans] and methods of treatment of the results of this action. Most recently [written in 1963] Sanotsky was involved in studies of the pathology and experimental therapy of the effect of radioactive compounds.” This man was definitely qualified as a specialist to evaluate Mairanovsky’s experiments.

Two more people from Mairanovsky’s list, Boris Tarusov and Gleb Frank, were widely known not just in the Russian medical community but also in the biological community. In 1952, Professor Boris Tarusov organized the Biophysics Department in the Biology Faculty of Moscow State University, and in January–February 2001, a conference dedicated to the one-hundredth anniversary of Tarusov was organized by this department. In 1961–1966, I was a biology student there and remember Tarusov as the Biophysics Department head. But I was a young molecular biologist and had no idea of the Biophysics Department’s involvement in secret work or that Tarusov was in fact a KGB expert.

Tarusov was not included in Mairanovsky’s list of examiners by chance. They worked at the same institutes at the same time: In 1931–1938 Tarusov was at the Bach Institute of Biochemistry, and in 1938–1940, he was the head of a VIEM laboratory. 149During this time, his main scientific interest was the investigation of the mechanism of action of toxins on cell protoplasm. Later, at the university, he specialized in the biophysical aspects of the action of radiation.

Gleb Frank (1904–1976) was a Soviet biophysicist, a member of the Academy of Sciences, and a foreign member of the East German and Hungarian Academies, as well as of a few international organizations. 150As a young scientist, he worked with the well-known cytologist Aleksandr Gurvich, the discoverer of mitogenetic radiation, first at Moscow University and then at the Physicotechnical Institute and Leningrad branch of VIEM, where he headed the Biophysics Department, and finally at the Institute of Experimental Biology (under the Gurvich’s directorship). 151In 1948, Frank organized the Institute of Biophysics within the Medical Academy of the USSR. Later, from 1957 until his death in 1976, he was director of the Academy Institute of Biophysics. In 1964, this institute moved from Moscow to the Academy Center in the town of Pushchino, about eighty miles from Moscow. 152But there is another detail in Frank’s biography tracing his connection to Mairanovsky: In 1933–1946, he worked at the same VIEM, where he headed the Department of Biophysics.

The Institute of Biophysics within the Medical Academy was first established in 1946 as the Radiation Laboratory, on the initiative of Academician Igor Kurchatov, 153head of the secret Laboratory No. 2, which was in charge of the Soviet atomic project. Later, Laboratory No. 2 became the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy within the Academy of Sciences. The goal of the Radiation Laboratory and then the Institute of Biophysics was to create principles of safe work with radioactive elements and to construct radiation dosimeter equipment. 154

Academician Frank is remembered by the Russian biological scientific community as being among those directors who supported independent scientists. 155One of the scientists who worked in Frank’s Institute of Biophysics, Simon Schnol, wrote about Frank: “He combined a vivid, sincere interest in science with a complete understanding of the ‘rules of the game’ [of the Communist Party officials].” 156“A director [of an academy institute] should have had specific talents… It was necessary to be in good relationships with the Party high-ranking officials and the KGB,” added Dr. Schnol. 157As already noted, the KGB controlled every institution in the former Soviet Union and exercised this control in many different ways. First, the head of the personnel department in every institution was usually a retired KGB officer. Second, a special “First Department” in every institution was in charge of “secrets.” No scientific papers (or books) could be published in any Russian or international journal without the approval of the head of the First Department of the Institute. These people were connected with a higher body, a special Academy First Department headed by a KGB general. Another KGB general headed the Academy Department of Foreign Relationships, which controlled and approved contacts with foreign colleagues. Moreover, the details of everyday life in all academy institutes were controlled by a KGB “curator,” located at KGB headquarters.