Boris Evgenyevich Raikow

Boris Evgenjewitsch Raikow ( Russian Борис Евгеньевич Райков ; * September 8th ^July / September 20,  1880 ^greg. In Moscow ; † August 1, 1966 in Leningrad ) was a Russian biologist and historian of natural sciences. Because of a dispute over the teachings of the Soviet geneticist Trofim Denisovich Lyssenko , he lost his academic position.

School, study and teacher

As the son of a doctor, he attended a Russian high school in Helsinki and St. Petersburg . There he began to study natural sciences with a focus on biology in 1899. Because of his political activities he was exiled to Wytegra . Since he was politically classified as an unreliable person , he completed his exams as an external student in 1905. Because of his political work, he was about to work at the Lesnaja School in St. Petersburg in the natural sciences. During his time as a teacher, he published a number of science books that received great attention in Russia. With others he published the journal The Sciences in School from 1912 .

Educational work

In 1913 he moved to the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg , the most important local high school. There was Vladimir Mikhailovich spondylitis mainly operates. He was appointed professor in 1918. With others he founded the Central Pedagogical Biological Station in Petrograd in 1919 . With the zoologist Mikhail Nikolajewitsch Rimski-Korsakow (1873-1951) he published a two-volume edition on the subject of excursions in zoology in 1924 . This publication was part of his efforts to introduce better teaching methods at universities and academies on the one hand, and in middle and lower-level schools on the other hand , with the help of the Society for the Dissemination of Science Education, which was founded in 1908 .

Professorship, editor and arrest

From 1920 he took over the ordinariate at the Alexander Herz Institute for Pedagogy in Petrograd, where he taught methodology in the natural sciences. He oversaw the publication of the journals Die Naturwissenschaften in der Schule , of which fifty-two volumes had appeared by 1930. From 1925 to 1930 he also published the journal Biologie und Schule , of which six volumes were published. Since 1916 he has also been engaged in the preparation of historical studies on the development of natural sciences in teaching in schools.

After 1930 his previous studies broke off. In the course of the Stalinist persecution he was arrested in Leningrad. From 1934 he took over the management of a medical-diagnostic institute on the Kola peninsula . Although this meant a scientific reorientation for him, he was also able to make this institution a model institute. In 1937 he then wrote a study on the development of heliocentrism in Russia. After the German invasion, he and his family were relocated to Arkhangelsk in 1941 , where he worked at the Pedagogical Institute. During these days of war he lost his previous personal library. There, too, he expanded the pedagogical curriculum and a natural science faculty with a four-year course could begin.

Dismissed because of Lysenko

After 1945 he returned to Leningrad, he obtained the doctorate to the doctor of pedagogical sciences. In 1948 he got into a dispute with the geneticist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his doctrine of the inheritance of traits. As a result, he lost his teaching license and was expelled from the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR . In this emergency he was supported by the then President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR , (AdW USSR) Sergei Ivanovich Vawilow . In Leningrad there was a branch of the AdW of the USSR. the later Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology, where he could work until 1966. From 1957 he also worked as an editor for the journal questions of the history of natural sciences and technology .

rehabilitation

In 1960, after Lyssenko's teachings had turned out to be heresy, he was solemnly rehabilitated . His previous work was honored in a volume on his 80th birthday. From 1906 to 1959 alone he was able to record 253 publications. The department of the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology honored him with a festive session on September 23, 1965, which was a special recognition of his previous work in the field of the history of Russian sciences.

Fonts (selection)

• From the history of the heliocentric worldview in Russia (Russian), 1947
• The Russian biologists and evolution theorists before Darwin (Russian), 4 volumes, 1947
• Paths and methods of education in natural sciences (Russian), Moscow 1960
• Caspar Friedrich Wolff , in: Zool. Yearbook Syst. 91 (1965), pp. 555-626
• Karl Ernst von Baer 1792-1876 - His life and work , in: Acta Historica Leopoldina, number 5, Leipzig 1968, pp. 10–516
• Christian Heinrich Pander - an important biologist and evolutionist 1794-1865 , Frankfurt / Main 1984 (Russian: Moscow 1964)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Koch (ed.), 5000 Soviet heads, Cologne 1959
2. ^ Heinrich von Knorre, Introduction to the German translation of the Baer biography, in: Acta Historica Leopoldina, number 5, Leipzig 1968, p. 11
3. ↑ Ilse Jahn (Ed.), History of Biology, 3rd new edition, Hamburg 2004, p. 932

literature

• Heinrich von Knorre: Boris Raikov - life picture of a Soviet historian of biology (1880-1966) . In: Journal for Medical Training . Vol. 61, No. 2 , January 1967, p. 105-106 .