Valery Soyfer — biophysicist, geneticist and historian of science with roots in the USSR
Valery Nikolayevich Soyfer was born on 16 October 1936 in Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, in the Russian SFSR of the Soviet Union, into a Russian-Jewish family. He studied at Moscow State University and became a biophysicist and molecular geneticist. As a young student in the 1950s he saw at first hand the power of Trofim Lysenko, who had driven classical genetics out of Soviet science, and he later met and spoke with him.
In the late 1970s, after he supported the physicist Andrei Sakharov and joined the dissident movement, Soyfer was stripped of his scientific degrees and positions. For nearly a decade he was excluded from scientific work, and he used the time to research the history of Lysenko and of Soviet biology, drawing on interviews, his own memories and archives that had long been inaccessible to scholars. In 1988, at the start of the Gorbachev reforms, he was unexpectedly allowed to leave; his Soviet citizenship was withdrawn and he emigrated to the United States.
In America he became a distinguished visiting professor, according to one archive at Ohio State University in Columbus, from 1988 to 1990, and then joined George Mason University in Virginia, where he was Clarence Robinson Professor from 1990, director of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics from 1990 to 2015 and distinguished university professor from 1993 to 2016. Rutgers University Press had offered him a contract for his history on his arrival, and in 1994 published Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, described by its publisher as the fullest account yet of Lysenko's life and times. In 1990 The Scientist reported on his joint application, with the Soviet molecular biologist Maxim Frank-Kamenetskii, for American research support for a laboratory in the Soviet Union. He has also written on the history of Soviet genetics in scientific journals, among them 'New light on the Lysenko era' in Nature (1989) and 'Tragic history of the VII International Congress of Genetics' in Genetics (2003).
His papers, documenting Soviet science and the dissident period, are held in the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture at Columbia University, which acquired them from him in 2007–08 and describes him as a well-known Russian biologist.
"Lost his Soviet citizenship in 1988 and emigrated to the United States the same year."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia)
Born in Gorky in 1936 into a Russian-Jewish family, he trained at Moscow State University and worked as a molecular geneticist in the Soviet Union until, in the late 1970s, he lost his posts and degrees after supporting Andrei Sakharov; he left for the United States in 1988.
Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod, Russia). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.