Nikolai Wladimirowitsch Timoféew-Ressowski

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Nikolai Timofejew-Ressowski (sculptor: Stefan Kaehne in 2006)

Nikolai Vladimirovich Timoféef-Ressowski or Nikolau Timoféef (f) -Ressovsky ( Russian Николай Владимирович Тимофеев-Ресовский ., Scientific transliteration Nikolay Timofeev-Vladimirovič Resovskij ; born September 7 . Jul / 20th September  1900 greg. In Moscow , † March 28 1981 in Obninsk ) was a Soviet geneticist from Russia who lived and researched in Berlin from 1925 to 1945 . He was married to the Russian geneticist Helena Alexandrovna Timofejew-Ressovsky .

In 1935, together with the geneticist Max Delbrück and the physicist Karl Günther Zimmer, he published a work on gene mutations, in which they were the first to propose to understand genes as complex atomic groups. Modern genetics began in Germany with this so-called “three-man book” .

Life

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Memorial plaque on the house, Robert-Rössle-Straße 10, in Berlin-Buch

Timofejew-Ressowski studied zoology, natural sciences and art history in Moscow. His studies were interrupted by his military service in the First World War and the civil war . After his studies he worked on mutations and the inheritance of genes in the fruit fly Drosophila . In 1925, the neurologist and brain researcher Oskar Vogt invited Timofejew-Ressowski and his wife Elena Aleksandrowna (1898–1973) to Berlin as visiting scholars at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research (KWI), where Timofejew-Ressowski built up the genetic department from 1926 and there in 1931 head of the department for experimental genetics. This department worked closely with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics . In 1930 the KWI was relocated to Berlin-Buch .

In 1928 Timoféef-Ressowski reported irradiation of fertilized eggs and larvae of the fruit fly Drosophila and produced fruit flies with mutated body parts. Such artificially created genetic damage (mutations) were used to research genes. He worked with Lothar Loeffler to generate mutations through X-rays (both were members of the DFG working group genetic damage caused by X-rays and radium rays).

Despite Moscow's request in 1937 to leave Germany and return to the Soviet Union , Timofejew-Ressovsky and his wife stayed in Berlin-Buch. Timoféeff had refused German citizenship. In the Soviet Union at this time genetics was ostracized under the biologist Trofim Lysenko and geneticists were also persecuted as part of the Stalinist purges . Two of Timofejew-Ressowski's younger brothers and family members of his wife were also arrested, and one of his brothers was executed. In 1938, the National Socialist German Lecturers' Association , which is relevant for biologists, gave him a positive recommendation because of his worldwide reputation and his anti-communism . In 1940 Timofejew-Ressowski was elected a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina .

The Timofejew-Ressovsky family helped many persecuted Jewish and foreign scholars and forced laborers. Her eldest son Dmitri (* 1923 in Moscow), who was a member of a resistance group, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and died on May 1, 1945 in Ebensee concentration camp . In 1945, after the Red Army marched into Berlin, Timofejew-Ressowski became temporarily director of the institute and mayor of Berlin-Buch.

However, on September 14, 1945, Timofejew-Ressovsky was arrested in Berlin-Buch, deported to the Soviet Union and sentenced to ten years in a labor camp in Moscow's Lubyanka prison by a Russian military court for treason. He was accused of not having returned to the Soviet Union in 1937 despite being asked to collaborate with the Nazis. From Moscow he came to a camp in Kazakhstan and was considered missing. A department of the Soviet secret service NKVD that Timofeyev-Ressowski wanted as experts in radiation damage as part of the Soviet atomic bomb program, made it two years later in Kazakhstan locate took him from the labor camp and brought him into the closed " research object 0211 " in Sungul in Urals . He was followed there in 1947 by his wife and second son Andrei (* 1927 in Berlin). Timofejew-Ressowski and his wife were able to work together scientifically again, but were not allowed to publish them until 1955.

In 1955 Timofejew-Ressovsky became head of the Biophysical Laboratory of the Siberian Department of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Sverdlovsk outside a prison camp. There and later near Moscow he was employed in atomic research. In 1964 he was given the opportunity to set up the Department of Genetics and Radiobiology at the new Institute of Medical Radiology in the closed town of Obninsk in the Kaluga region . In 1970 he retired, but then continued to work scientifically and published several books with his students, including the book "Introduction to Molecular Radiobiology", which appeared shortly before his death in 1981.

Only after the end of the Soviet Union was Timofejew-Ressovsky rehabilitated in June 1992, eleven years after his death.

Honors

The Timoféeff Ressovsky House, May 2013

Since the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, MDC, was founded, a memorial plaque has commemorated him on the Berlin-Buch campus. On June 30, 2006, the MDC and the Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) opened the new laboratory building for medical genome research, which was named after Timofejew-Ressowski. In front of it is his portrait in stone, which the Berlin sculptor Stefan Kaehne created in 2006.

A number of symposia have been held in honor of Timofejew-Ressowski in recent years. His 100th birthday was celebrated in September 2000 both in Russia in Dubna near Moscow and in Germany at the MDC in Berlin-Buch. His son, the physicist Andrei Timofejew, took part in both conferences. The cell biologist and cancer researcher from Essen, who has been working with Timofejew-Ressowski for years, also gave the keynote lecture on him at the symposium on his 110th birthday on December 8, 2010.

Works

  • Autobiography . In: Nova Acta Leopoldina . Edited by the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. NF 21, No. 143, 1959, pp. 301 f.
  • Experimental studies of the hereditary burden of populations . In: Der Erbarzt , 1935, No. 8, pp. 117 f.
  • with Karl Günther Zimmer and Max Delbrück: About the nature of gene mutation and gene structure. News from the Society of Sciences in Göttingen , Section 6 Biology, New Series No. 13, 1935 ISSN  0369-6669 pp. 189–245
  • with Max Delbrück: Radiation genetic experiments on visible mutations and the mutability of individual genes in Drosophila melangoster . In: Journal for inductive descent and inheritance , 71, 1936, pp. 322–334
  • with Elena Timofejew-Ressowski: Population genetic experiments on Drosophila. Parts 1 to 3. In: Journal for inductive descent and inheritance , 1941, pp. 28–34, 35–43 and 44–49
  • with Karl Günter Zimmer: Radiation Genetics . In: Strahlentherapie , 74, 1944, pp. 183-211

literature

Roman-like processing of the rescue of Jews in the institute 1943–1946

  • Elly Welt: Berlin labyrinth. Novel. Translated from the English ( Berlin Wild , Fontana, 1987) by Guy Montag. Benziger, Zurich 1990. ISBN 978-3-545-36438-7

Web links

Commons : Nikolai Wladimirowitsch Timofejew-Ressowski  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volker Wunderlich: Karl Günther Zimmer on his hundredth birthday: “That was the basic radiobiology that was.” ( Memento of the original from January 15, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Website of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, July 8, 2011, accessed on April 8, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / mdc.helmholtz.de
  2. ^ Heidrun Kaupen-Haas : The planners in the Advisory Board for Population and Race Policy. In: 23. Deutscher Soziologentag 1986. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1987, pp. 754–759 ( doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-322-83517-8_177 ).
  3. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , pp. 29 f., 177, 270 and 387.
  4. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 195.
  5. ^ List of members Leopoldina, Nikolaj V. Timoféeff-Ressovsky
  6. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 195.
  7. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 195.
  8. ^ National Socialist "trade journal" on racial hygiene
  9. ↑ his wife, whose large part of the research results is consistently belittled or ignored in scientific historical presentations
  10. ↑ Berlin 1943–1946: In the corridors of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neurophysiological Research or for Brain Research, a huge building, the highly gifted “ half-Jew ” Josef Bernhardt survived the horrors as a “trainee” hidden by scientists in the midst of many fellow destinies currently. Just as the whole novel is laid out as a farce despite the serious background, so is NT-R. here drawn in a slightly exaggerated clownish manner, without neglecting in the least the rescue of many Jews and half-Jews in the institute, which he had made his task in these years. As the US author pointed out in an interview, the novel is largely based on experiences that her husband had as an adolescent in those years at the institute.
personal data
SURNAME Timoféew-Ressowski, Nikolai Wladimirowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Тимофеев-Ресовский, Николай Владимирович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian geneticist
DATE OF BIRTH 20th September 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 1981
Place of death Obninsk