Helena Alexandrovna Timofejew-Ressovsky

Helena Alexandrovna Timofeyev-Ressowski ( Russian Елена Александровна Тимофеев-Ресовский ., Scientific transliteration Eléna Aleksandrovna Timofeev-Resovskij ; born June 9 ^{. Jul} / 21st June  1898 ^greg. In Moscow , † 29 April 1973 in Obninsk ) was a Russian geneticist . She was married to the Russian geneticist Nikolai Timofejew-Ressovsky . In addition to their common family life, the couple also shared a research life. Despite joint research and numerous joint publications, Helena Timofejew gradually fell into the scientific shadow of her husband in the scientific community . In addition to biographical data, this article presents the weaker scientific perception of Helena Timofejew towards her husband Nikolai. The science historians Helga Satzinger and Annette Vogt assume that the qualitative part of the genetic Timofejew research results of Helena to the part of her husband Nikolai is clear is underestimated and has to be estimated much higher.

Family, youth, student days

Events from the youth, family and student days of Helena Timofejew-Ressowski are only known from the memories recorded by her husband Nikolai. She was born in Moscow on June 21, 1898 as Helena Alexandrovna Fidler. On her father's side, she had German ancestors. The family was assimilated. Her father Aleksandr Fidler (also Fiedler) ran a private girls' high school in Moscow. Nothing is known of her mother. Of nine children, seven daughters and two sons, Helena was one of the youngest. Several of her older sisters studied, the eldest chose musicology as a subject, three other sisters became chemists. Helena grew up well protected in a well-off family and received an excellent education. In May 1917 she finished the Alferovsky High School in Moscow.

She began studying biology and zoology with Nikolai Konstantinowitsch Kolzow, among others . Contemporaries considered him the best Russian zoologist. The training at Kolzow was very broad and thorough. The classical subjects of zoology and comparative morphology were taught as well as newly emerging areas of experimental biology. In addition to laboratory work, the students also had to carry out ecological observations and experiments under field conditions. In addition, they had to deal with epistemology.

In the middle of Helena Fidler's studies, the tremendous political upheavals broke out that changed Russia and led to the establishment of the USSR in 1922 , of which she became and remained a citizen for life. She experienced the civil war first hand, as she was on an expedition in the south of what was then Russia in the early 1920s. At the Simpferopol University in Crimea, she was lucky enough to hear the best professors from Moscow who had fled there from the starving central Russian part. Here she made the acquaintance of the geologist Wladimir Ivanovich Wernadski , who after 1947 was to acquire great scientific importance for her and her future husband due to his ecological ideas.

Unconventional career entry

After returning to Moscow, she met Nikolai Timofejew-Ressovsky, a student two years her junior, at the Koltsov Institute. They married a short time later in May 1922. On September 11, 1923, their first son Dmitri, called Foma, was born in Moscow. Both parents were young and supported the new role of women. Helena continued to work as a biologist and didn't just want to be the mother of her little son. Without a degree, which was regarded as "bourgeois" after the revolution, both worked in the genetics department of the Moscow Institute of Experimental Biology under the direction of Sergei Sergejewitsch Tschetwerikow . Hermann Joseph Muller established this geneticist working group during a visit in 1922 and brought breeding strains of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to the USSR, with which Thomas Hunt Morgan's working group had been investigating inheritance processes since 1910 . In contrast to the Americans, the Cheetverikov group used the cross-breeding experiments to investigate questions about the heredity and formation of species in the course of evolution. The group thus laid important foundations for the synthetic theory of evolution .

The Berlin years

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research

In the early 1920s, the Berlin brain researcher Oskar Vogt visited Moscow several times. For his institute, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for brain research , he was looking for young scientists who had mastered both insect systematics and genetics. He had good contacts with Nikolai Aleksandrovic Semascko, then People's Commissar for Health Care of the USSR . The latter suggested the Timofejew-Ressovsky couple for the upcoming scientific task. Helena and Nikolai Timoféeff-Ressovsky went to Berlin with their son, where both were to work for a while in Vogt's institute. Nobody suspected that this stay in Berlin would extend to 20 years. In the activity report of the KWI from 1925 it says: “The genetic department then experienced a further expansion. [...] In addition, Dr. TIMOFEEFF from Moscow at the […] Drosophila systematically put certain questions into work. ”The working conditions at the KWI in the 1920s were fantastic:“ The atmosphere at the institute was […] cosmopolitan. [...] Foreign scientists often worked at the institute, the languages ​​spoken were German, French and Russian. The genetic department became a "Russian colony", but Elena and Nikolai Timoféeff-Ressovsky also spoke and wrote German. "

Mutation experiments

On April 9, 1927 Helena Timofejew-Ressovsky gave birth to her second son Andrei. In 1927 the 5th International Genetics Congress took place in Berlin. Muller presented his new method, which has significant consequences in terms of biological history, of experimentally generating new hereditary properties in Drosophila using X-rays. Helena and Nikolai Timofejew immediately adopted this method and developed the focus on mutation research, which subsequently established the fame of both researchers in the 1930s. Helena and Nikolai Timofejew got new researchers at the Genetics Institute of the KWI. Instead of Theodosius Dobzhansky , who was not available, Sergei Romanowitsch Zarapkin came to Berlin with his wife Aleksandra Sergeevna. Estera Tenenbaum , who holds a doctorate in biology , joined the genetic department in 1929, but had to emigrate in 1934. Hermann Joseph Muller also worked at the aforementioned KWI institute in the early 1930s.

The Timofejew-Ressowskis maintained contact with their former institute in Moscow and published some of their Berlin work in Soviet magazines. Until 1929, the establishment of a scientific German-Soviet cooperation seemed promising, especially with regard to population genetics. Nikolai became head of the Experimental Genetics Department that year. Helena remained an assistant. Between 1925 and 1933 the Timofejews published over 36 articles in German, Russian, English and US American journals.

Gender-specific advantages and disadvantages

A gender-specific division of labor developed between Helena and Nikolai Timofejew-Ressowski inside and outside the laboratory. Helena always worked in the laboratory and bore the brunt of bringing up her two sons. Nikolai Timofejew himself reported that it was his wife who tried to hold together the money that he spent abundantly when he went to conferences or lectures alone. The climate at the Berlin Institute for Genetics changed drastically when the National Socialists came to power. Helena had to give in to the pressure against the so-called double-earning system, with which the National Socialists wanted to end the employment of married women, and officially give up her job. She officially resigned as an assistant, but continued to work in her husband's laboratory. While Nikolai Timofejew was able to strengthen his position as a scientist with the National Socialists until 1938, the position of his wife Helena deteriorated noticeably. She was only a working wife, without formal status or academic title, which was detrimental to the perception of her work and its importance. In addition, under the scientific conditions of the National Socialists, she was often simply not mentioned as a co-author.

Influences of politics

In 1937 the Russian embassy in Berlin demanded the return of the Timofejew-Ressovsky couple. Russian genetic colleagues such as the aforementioned Kolzow and the botanist Nikolai Wawilow warned the Timofejew couple against possible deportations to Siberia when they returned to Russia. Lyssenko's neolamarckist hereditary teaching had become socially acceptable under Stalin . Followers of classical genetics were denigrated in the Soviet Union under the aegis of Stalin as Mendelists , Weismannists and Morganists and taken to camps as dissidents. In Berlin, on the other hand, Nikolai Timofeev's research group was established and upgraded as an independent department in the KWI. He himself became a scientific member of the KWI. In addition, Nikolai Timofejew was elected a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina in 1940 . The mutation research, which is essentially based on atomic physics methods and theories, led to Timofeev's collaboration with a number of younger physicists such as Max Delbrück , Karl Günther Zimmer , Pascual Jordan , Friedrich Possible and Robert Rompe . All these physicists gained significant scientific influence in their home countries after 1945. It seems as if Nikolai Timofejew had entered a research domain dominated exclusively by men, which required apparatus engineering and physical-theoretical discussions, while his wife Helena did the less spectacular and less publicized work in the laboratory with the planning and implementation of crossbreeding experiments.

The Second World War for the Timofejews

With the attack by Hitler Germany on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the situation of Helena and Nikolai Timofejew changed suddenly. Outwardly, they got into the role of hostile foreigners in Berlin, mentally they got into conflicts of loyalty. They were loyal to their state, the Soviet Union, but conducted research that was important to the war effort on the German side. Her son Dmitri, now 18 years old, was deported to Mauthausen concentration camp in 1942 and killed there on May 1, 1945. As a leading member of a group of young people, he had resisted the National Socialists and organized them. The Timofeevs helped regardless of their son's arrest - they only found out about his death much later. - people at risk, such as fellow Jews, prisoners of war and forced laborers. Last but not least, the hope of seeing their son Dmitri alive again prompted the married couple Helena and Nikolai Timofejew to stay in Berlin, while all other employees of the KWI Institute left the city before the advancing Russian army to the west.

the post war period

Nikolai Timofejew was arrested in October 1945 because he did not return to the Soviet Union in 1937 and was taken to a camp in Kazakhstan. After a year he was released and then headed a research department within the Soviet nuclear project in the Urals. In terms of content, it was about researching the effects of radiation on living beings. Helena Timofejew stayed in Berlin. She didn't know where her husband had gone or what had happened to her son. At times she mastered her life with care packages from American geneticists such as Hermann Joseph Muller and Milislav Demerec . In 1947 Helena Timofejew received a sign of life from her husband and followed him with son Andrei to the Urals. All the news about son Dmitri that has been received in the meantime resulted in the fact that he had not survived the Mauthausen concentration camp. From 1947 the couple worked again in a research department in the Urals headed by Nikolai Timofejew. The task within the Russian nuclear project and the resulting absolute secrecy meant that nothing tangible was known about the research of the couple from 1947 to 1956.

Outside the Soviet Union, previously unpublished articles by Nikolai Timofejews were published during this time, which he wrote before 1945, among others, with the ornithologist Erwin Stresemann (On the evolutionary problem of the genesis of the herring gull) or with Karl Günther Zimmer (The hit principle in biology) would have. It is no longer possible to clarify in detail who, with what motivation, brought such articles to the publication at this point in time. Possibly one wanted to keep and support Nikolai Timofejew in the scientific discourse with these publications. Helena Timofejew definitely did not have such support.

Research in the Urals (1955 to 1964)

After Stalin's death in March 1953 and Khrushchev's assumption of office, conditions for the Timofeev improved. At the end of 1955 they were allowed to travel to Moscow again for the first time. Nikolai Timofejew-Ressovsky, as a non-rehabilitated former camp inmate, did not receive a permit to move to or a work permit for Moscow. For the first time, the lack of academic degrees from both of them turned out to be a problem. Helena Timofejew had to read scientific documents to her husband, who had suffered from retinal detachment since his imprisonment in the camp. From 1955 both worked in the Department of Radiobiology and Biophysics of the Institute of Biology of the Ural Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (UFAN) with an official address in Sverdlovsk . Contacts, including with foreign scientists, were possible again, but were subject to state controls. In this academy institute, Helena Timofejew-Ressowski wrote her dissertation in 1956. She was formally better educated than her husband. It was not until 1964, after numerous disputes, that he was awarded the title of doctor. Now that her husband had regained recognition in her own country, Helena Timofejew-Ressovsky fell back into its scientific shadow.

In 1963 she published the anthology on the distribution of radioisotopes according to the main components of freshwater reservoirs . The articles examined the accumulation of different radioisotopes in different freshwater plants. From these and other publications by Helena Timofejew-Ressowski from 1957 to 1963, it can be concluded that her research focus was on the accumulation of radionuclides in freshwater organisms. The investigated radionuclides strontium-90 and cesium-137 are those that occur during nuclear fission processes in nuclear reactors and that may also end up in nature. Helena Timofejew and her husband were evidently investigating possible biological methods of decontamination. Helena Timofejew-Ressowski had developed the idea of ​​channeling radioactively contaminated water over cascades that were planted in a certain way, so that the plants took up and collected the radionuclides. The plants could then be properly disposed of.

Nikolai Timofejew-Ressowski published from 1963 individual articles on radiation and cytogenetics. In doing so, he reestablished genetic research in the Soviet Union, which was literally demolished by Lysenkoism . In this context he received high quality foreign scientific honors. For the 100th anniversary of Darwin's publication of the origin of species , Timofejew received the Darwin plaque from the Leopoldina in 1959 together with Elisabeth Schiemann , Hans Stubbe and the aforementioned Tschetwerikow, Muller and Dobzhansky . In 1966 he was awarded the Kimber Gold Medal for Genetics by the Academy of Sciences in the USA . To mark the 100th anniversary of Mendel's publication, in 1970 he was awarded the New Mendel Medal of the Leopoldina , donated in 1965 . Nikolai Timofejew could not personally accept any of these honors. His wife Helena, on the other hand, was hardly noticed scientifically abroad.

The closed city of Obninsk

In 1964 Helena and Nikolai Timofejew moved to the "closed city" Obninsk about 110 kilometers southwest of Moscow. The world's first civil nuclear power plant ( Obninsk nuclear power plant ) was built here in 1954 . Visiting such cities was largely prohibited for reasons of secrecy. This situation made visits to the Timofeevs particularly attractive. Nikolai headed the Radiobiology and Genetics Department at the Institute of Medical Radiology at the Academy of Medical Sciences. His wife Helena was only allowed to work as a member of one of his research groups, although she had completed her habilitation, with the formal justification that she had already exceeded the retirement age of 55 for women. The regulation of retirement at the age of 60, which is analogous to men, was never strictly applied in academy institutes. In the early 1970s, Nikolai Timofejew was given a position as a “consultant”, a retired but employed scientist, at the Academy Institute for Medical-Biological Problems in Moscow. There was no such position for his wife Helena. Nikolai Timofejew drove i. d. Usually to Moscow twice a week in this capacity, sometimes accompanied by Ms. Helena. In this way, both of them were able to see their old Berlin colleagues Hans Stubbe and Georg Melchers in Moscow in 1972 . Shortly afterwards, on April 29, 1973, Helena Timofejew-Ressowski died in Obninsk.

Nikolai Timofejew-Ressovsky had again become an important figure in Moscow's intellectual life from the early 1970s. Students and young fellow researchers encouraged him to write down his memoirs. In these memoirs as well as in the subsequent biography of Nikolai Timofejew by Daniil Granin, Helena Timofejew's research merits took a back seat. Nikolai Timofejew-Ressovsky died eight years after his wife on March 28, 1981.

For the first time in May 1998 a newspaper article in the Soviet Union by SV Vonsovskij commemorated the scientist on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Helena Timofejew-Ressowski. In summary, it must be stated that Helena Timofejew-Ressowski's research merits have been systematically downplayed and written down over the years. In fact, certain research findings, such as those on the decontamination of radioactive water at planting cascades, explicitly achieved by Helena Timofejew, were later attributed to her husband Nikolai in the Soviet research tradition.

literature

• Helga Satzinger, Annette Vogt: Elena Aleksandrovna and Nikolaj Vladimirovic Timoféeff-Ressovsky (1898-1973; 1900-1981). Max Planck Society, accessed on August 26, 2018 . 
• Daniil Granin: The geneticist. The life of Nikolai Timofejew-Ressovsky, called Ur. Cologne 1988, Pahl-Rugenstein, 1988
• Vonsovskij, SV: Pamjati EA Timofeevoj-Resovskoj. (in memory of EA Timofeeva-Resovskaja) In: Nauka Urala, No.9 (May) 1998, p. 4. (Article on the 100th birthday of Elena Timoféeff-Ressovsky)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In the biological specialist literature, the transcription "Timoféeff-Ressovsky" has become the norm for the surname of the researcher couple. This is the transcription that the Timofejew-Ressovsky couple themselves used for their German-language scientific publications.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Helga Satzinger, Anette Vogt: Elena Aleksandrovna and Nikolaj Vladimirovic Timoféeff-Ressovsky
3. ↑ The article is based on the historical research by Helga Satzinger and Anette Vogt: Elena Aleksandrovna and Nikolaj Vladimirovic Timoféeff-Ressovsky
4. ^ From the activity report of the KWI 1925, according to Satzinger, Vogt.