Zhores Medvedev

Zhores Aleksandrovich Medvedev (1925 to 2018) was a Russian agronomist, biologist, historian and dissident, the twin brother of the historian Roy Medvedev. Born in Tbilisi, he was drafted into the Red Army in 1943, was soon discharged after being seriously wounded, and studied biology at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy in Moscow, receiving a PhD in December 1950 for research on sexual processes in plants. He worked in the academy's Agrochemistry and Biochemistry Department until 1963, from 1952 studied the problems of aging, and in 1961 published the first paper suggesting that aging results from an accumulation of errors in the synthesis of proteins and nucleic acids. His history of Soviet genetics, written in 1962 and withheld by state censors, was published in the United States in 1969 as The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko. He led a molecular radiobiology laboratory in Obninsk from 1963 and was dismissed in 1969, was detained in a psychiatric hospital in 1970 and released after protests by scientists and writers, and from 1971 worked at the Institute of Physiology and Biochemistry of Farm Animals in Borovsk.