Kolzov Nikolai

Nikolai K. Koltsov (1872-1940) is one of the key figures in Russian biology. He essentially founded Russian physico-chemical biology and established a major scientific school in this field. Kolzov was born into a wealthy family; his father was an accountant in a fur factory. He graduated from Moscow University in 1894 and was a professor there (1895-1911). In mid-1917, shortly before the October Revolution, he founded and headed the Institute of Experimental Biology. He was a member of the Agricultural Academy (VASKhNIL). He was against the tsarist regime, but after the revolution he opposed various political measures of the new government. In 1911, he left Moscow University and transferred to the Shanyavsky Moscow People's University. In 1920, Koltsov was arrested as a member of the non-existent "anti-Soviet tactical center", which had been invented by the VCheKa. Public prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko demanded the death penalty for Koltsov (67 of around 1000 people arrested were executed). However, after a personal appeal by Maxim Gorky to Vladimir Lenin, Koltsov was released and regained his position as head of the Koltsov Institute of Experimental Biology.

His students included the geneticists B.L. Astaurov, S.S. Chetverikov, N.P. Dubinin, V.P. Efroimson, I.A. Rapoport, V.V. Sakharov and N.V. Timofeeff-Ressovsky; the histologist G.I. Roskin, the experimental surgeon A.G. Lapchinsky, the developmental biologist M.M. Zavadovsky, the physiologist L.V. Krushinsky, the microbiologist S.M. Gershenson, the biochemist V.A. Engelhardt, the hydrobiologist G.G. Vinberg, the cytologist M.A. Peshkov and many other famous Soviet biologists.

Koltsov made several fundamental discoveries, the first of which was the discovery of the cytoskeleton (1903). He was the first to formulate the idea of a crystal-like mechanism for the duplication of genetic information (1927) and the principles of epigenetics (and in 1934 the term itself; it seems surprising, but as early as 1915 he hypothesized that gene methylation could be a mechanism of genetic variability). He began the work that later led his students V.V. Sakharov and I.A. Rapoport to the discovery of chemical mutagenesis.

His research on sex regulation in silkworms was later successfully continued by B.L. Astaurov. Koltsov inspired the entomologist S.S. Chetverikov to study the genetics of natural Drosophila populations, which formed the basis for the Modern Synthesis that reconciled Darwin's theory of evolution and Mendel's laws of inheritance.

Unfortunately, N.K. Kolzov's name has almost been forgotten. This is mainly due to the fact that the mention of his name was forbidden in the USSR for a long time, as he was a staunch opponent of Lysenko. Soviet policy put the idea of genes, i.e. particles that determine the outcome of life, at odds with the concept of individual freedom. The Marxist ideologues placed geneticists in the same league as eugenicists, racists and fascists, while at the same time favoring the ideas of Lamarckism as represented by Trofim Lysenko.

In 1937 and 1939, Lysenko's followers published a series of propaganda articles against Nikolai Koltsov and Nikolai Vavilov. They wrote: "The Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences not only did not criticize the fascist nonsense of Professor Koltsov, but also did not dissociate itself from his "theories" supporting the racial theories of the fascists". Koltsov allegedly died of a stroke in 1940. However, the biochemist Ilya Zbarsky revealed that Koltsov's unexpected death was due to poisoning by the NKVD, the Soviet Union's secret police. On the same day, his wife, the scientist Maria Sadovnikova Kolzova, committed suicide.

Nikolai Kolzov was interested in cytology and vertebrate anatomy. In 1903, Kolzov demonstrated that the shape of cells is determined by a network of tubes that form a skeleton, which was later referred to as the cytoskeleton. He saw the role of gel-sol junctions in the cytoplasm as a key mechanism for cell structure. The American geneticist Richard Goldschmidt wrote about him: "There was the brilliant Nikolai Kolzov, probably the best Russian zoologist of the last generation, an enviable, incredibly cultured, clear-thinking scholar who was admired by all who knew him".

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