Lev Zilber. Zilber Lev Alexandrovich Lev Zilber biography

Zilber Lev Alexandrovich was born into the family of a military musician. His father, Abel Abramovich Zilber, was the deputy bandmaster of an infantry regiment located in Pskov. Having graduated from the Pskov provincial gymnasium in 1912 with a silver medal, L. Zilber entered the natural sciences department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. In 1915, he transferred to the medical faculty of Moscow University, receiving permission to simultaneously attend classes in the natural sciences department. During the First World War, Zilber went to the front, and upon returning, he continued his studies at the university. In 1917 he received a doctor's diploma, in 1919 - a candidate of natural sciences. During the Civil War, he served as a doctor in the Red Army, was captured by the White Guards and miraculously escaped death. From 1921 he worked in Moscow at the Institute of Microbiology of the People's Commissariat of Health. Since that time, he began research devoted to the study of the variability of microorganisms, the development of antiviral immunity, the thermal stability of antigens, antibodies and complement.

In the early thirties, L. Zilber was appointed director of the Baku Institute of Microbiology, but he did not work in this capacity for long. A plague epidemic broke out in Nagorno-Karabakh, and there was a danger of the infection spreading. Sanitary and epidemiological squad headed by L.A. Zilber managed to quickly localize the infection, but L. Zilber was accused of sabotage and spent four months in prison. He was saved by the intercession of Maxim Gorky. His literary godson, Lev Zilber’s younger brother, writer Veniamin Kaverin, addressed the famous writer with a letter.

In 1931, Lev Alexandrovich returned to Moscow and soon created the country's first Central Virology Laboratory.

In 1937, when a severe neurological disease appeared in some taiga regions of the Far East, often ending in death and threatening not only the local population, but the troops stationed there, L.A. Zilber led an expedition sent there. The expedition proved the viral nature of the disease, which was called tick-borne encephalitis, and identified the carrier of the disease - ticks. The therapeutic effect of serums from people who had recovered from encephalitis was shown. The first experimental vaccine was even made. Preventive measures immediately reduced the incidence. This was the birth of domestic medical virology. However, it was 1937, and following a monstrous, absurd and blasphemous denunciation, Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber was arrested. In the absence of the arrested person and without his name, the first scientific report on the etiology of tick-borne encephalitis was published. A number of participants in the Zilber expedition, as well as leaders and participants in the second and third expeditions of 1938 and 1939. (E.N. Pavlovsky, A.A. Smorodintsev, P.A. Petrishcheva) were awarded the Stalin Prize of the 1st degree. Among the laureates are L.A. Zilber was not there.

In 1939, Lev Zilber was released. Upon his release, Zilber published a classic fundamental work on tick-borne encephalitis, written in the fresh wake of the expedition back in 1937, wrote a monograph on encephalitis, submitted it to the publishing house in December 1939, but the book was not published: in 1940, a second arrest followed the sentence was ten years in the camps. This was Lev Zilber's most difficult imprisonment. He almost died from exhaustion and overwork. The scientist was saved by chance and medical education: he worked in the infirmary, where he created a small scientific laboratory

While imprisoned (1937-1939, 1940-1944), Zilber served part of his sentence in the camps on Pechora. Here, in the conditions of the tundra, he created a drug against pellagra - antipellagrin and saved the lives of hundreds of prisoners who died from complete vitamin deficiency. There he developed a method for making alcohol from reindeer moss.

While in the camp, L.A. Zilber refused repeated proposals to work on bacteriological weapons. Remembering Zilber’s ability to obtain alcohol from reindeer moss, his superiors sent him to the chemical “sharashka”. Work in the “sharashka” was an outlet that allowed him to at least partially return to science, without which Lev Alexandrovich could not exist.

Based on the results of experiments conducted by Lev Aleksandrovich in the camp "sharashka", he expressed two main points: tumors are of viral origin, but the virus performs only initiating functions in tumor progression, i.e. only starts the neoplastic process.

L.A. Zilber owes much of his release to his wife Zinaida Ermolyevna, academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, microbiologist, creator of domestic penicillin. She handed over to the Kremlin a letter of Lev Zilber’s innocence, signed by the country’s most prominent scientists, addressed to Joseph Stalin. In 1944, Lev Zilber was released.

A year after his release, in 1945, Zilber was awarded the Stalin Prize and he was elected a full member of the newly created Academy of Medical Sciences, he became the scientific director of the Institute of Virology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and headed the department of virology and tumor immunology of the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology. N.F. Ga-maley, where he worked all subsequent years.

In 1946, Zilber finally formulated his virogenetic concept of the origin of tumors. Soon Lev Aleksandrovich came up with the idea of ​​using immunological markers to identify oncoviruses and their protein products in human tumors. In fact, Zilber and his collaborators were pioneers in the new field of immunology - the discovery of specific tumor antigens.

In 1947, L.A. Zilber discovered antigens specific to human and animal tumors. In 1957 he established simultaneously with Svet-Moldavsky G.Ya. pathogenicity of chicken sarcoma virus for mammals. For these studies, he was posthumously awarded the State Prize in 1967.

Lev Zilber Career: Biologist
Birth: Russia, 27.3.1894
Lev Alexandrovich was a passionate person, who devoted himself to any cause, to any idea, which captured him entirely, without reserve, with incredible energy, pressure, impatience and fury. There was nothing in his life that he did out of duty, out of service, half-heartedly, somehow.

The life of Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber (1894-1966) undoubtedly covered the most tragic period of time in the history of Russia, which included the events of the Russo-Japanese War, the revolution of 1905, two revolutions of 1917, two world and civil wars, Stalin’s terror of the 3050s , GULAG, VASKHNIL session (1948), Pavlovsk session (1950), “doctors’ occupation” (1952), rampant anti-Semitism, the fight against cosmopolitanism. Only two short periods of his life can be considered relatively normal: until 1917 and then 1953, and between these dates there were seven and a half years of prisons and camps.

We will begin our essay about the tragic (and happy!) fate of the scientist with a brief description of his personality, due to the fact that this will allow us to understand his creative path much better. Decades of daily communication with L.A. Zilber give us the right to do this.

Lev Alexandrovich was a passionate person who devoted himself to any cause, every idea, which captured him completely, without reserve, with incredible energy, pressure, impatience and fury. There was nothing in his life that he did out of duty, out of service, half-heartedly, somehow. He had a favorite expression, not very correct from the point of view of normative grammar, but very characteristic of him: “As it should be.” This could touch experience, the one that should be installed “as it should be,” and the water supply in the country, the one that he did “as it should be,” and in general everything around him.

It would seem that the passion of nature and irrepressible vital energy should give rise to haste, haste, and reluctance to do the same thing for a long time. In fact, Zilber had rare patience and perseverance in achieving goals, although it took years. Thus, the last 20 years of his life were spent searching for an impeccable proof of the virogenetic theory of the origin of tumors that he developed.

Lev Aleksandrovich set goals for himself that under no circumstances were private, narrow, or secondary; under no circumstances was he interested in “sewing the last button to a sewn uniform” (Zilber’s expression). He was attracted to goals that were either easily invisible to others or seemed unattainable. This maximalism, reluctance to work in established areas of science, abrupt departure from one area and invasion into another, which at first looked irrational, actually followed an internal logic, where the leading factors were the romance of the unknown, the resistance of the material, and the difficulty of achieving results.

When there were no more difficult tasks left for him in microbiology and bacteriology, as he then considered, he went into virology, which at that time did not exist as an established science, and this was precisely what attracted him. When medical infectious virology as a science took shape, it already became uninteresting for Zilber, and he began to build non-infectious oncovirology. Changing not the directions in one science, but the sciences themselves, he carried through his entire existence a constant attachment to immunology. From his first steps in science under the leadership of V.A. Barykin* until his last years, when he worked on a vaccine against tumors, his fascination with the problems of immunity did not weaken, and he used immunological methods throughout his life. It seems to us that this is also not accidental. Immunology is one of the most complex areas of biology and medicine, which throughout the 20th century. remained the focus of researchers' attention. Of course, immunology is one of the most, if one may say so, biological disciplines among many life sciences, bordering on medicine, and if we use modern terminology, biomedicine was the core of the entire scientific life of Zilber, who had two completed higher educations in natural sciences (Petersburg University) and medical (Moscow University). It is interesting that he was born into a family of musicians, where there was not a single person of science before him, and his father categorically objected to his entering a university, since he absolutely wanted to make his son a violinist. Zilber’s virological interests practically grew out of his work on microbiology, because that both bacteria and viruses, coexisting in higher organisms, should, according to Lev Aleksandrovich, interact with each other, and this interaction could be both symbiotic and antagonistic. The experiments began with studying the adsorption of the smallpox vaccine virus in vitro on yeast cells (together with E. Vostrukhova, and later with A. Belyaeva). It has been demonstrated that living yeast cells are capable of adsorbing significant amounts of vaccinia virus. Zilber's colleagues observed a similar phenomenon in experiments with other viruses and found that, in addition to yeast, some bacteria and protozoa (single-celled eukaryotes) can also adsorb viruses.

All this data led Lev Aleksandrovich to the concept that postulated the symbiosis of viruses and microbes. It received the name virophoria, and in a broader sense, allobiophoria (Zilber's term). Lev Aleksandrovich emphasized that this phenomenon has not only a general biological, but also an important practical role, since it can fundamentally influence the epidemiology of some viral infections. He believed that in some cases the virus penetrates the cells of microorganisms and multiplies in them, since experiments indicated this possibility. These views of Zilber were so far ahead of their time that for a long time they found themselves outside the field of view of contemporary researchers.

The development of domestic virology, especially medical, was powerfully stimulated by the All-Union Conference on the Problem of Ultraviruses (1935). At the meeting, Zilber gave a keynote speech, where the image of viruses was considered in the broadest theoretical and practical terms in biology, medicine, and agriculture. Amazingly, already in this report he formulated quite clearly the prospect of a virological approach to the problem of the origin of tumors. Moreover, it mentioned the possibility of the existence of foreign antigens in tumors as markers of the presence of tumor-derived viruses. The report indisputably shows that upon entering virology, Zilber was already concerned with the problems of virology and cancer immunology.

At the same time, he created the Central Virus Laboratory of the People's Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR. The laboratory became the first independent virological institution in our country, whose forcedly brief (1934-1937) and brilliant presence remained forever in the history of domestic science. At the Institute of Microbiology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Lev Alexandrovich organized the virology department. It is characteristic that Zilber always strived for the harmonious development of virology both as a part of biology and as a part of medicine. In the laboratory the emphasis was on the medical aspects of virology, and in the department on general biology. This approach, laid down by Zilber, is still preserved in Russian virology, in the works of famous virologists. In the works of the Central Virus Laboratory, the scientist’s integral approach to virological problems was dazzlingly manifested: it is not easy to study viruses (primarily the influenza virus), but also immunity to them . Silber's extensive knowledge in the field of immunology finds a new application here to very little-studied objects. The most important task of the first virological institutions in the country was training. All the way, Lev Aleksandrovich preferred to work with young people who were full of enthusiasm and capable of easily understanding new ideas and methods. The laboratory consisted of extremely young people, and their leader was only 40 years old. The turning point in the history of domestic medical virology and in the fate of the majority of the employees of the Central Virus Laboratory, the triumph and tragedy of its leader Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber, was the legendary expedition to the Far East in 1937. Since the beginning of the 30s, in a number of places in the Far East, doctors discovered severe acute diseases , often ending in the death of patients, as the central nervous organization was affected. The disease was not studied at all and was classified by local doctors as “toxic flu”. In 1935, Dr. A.G. Panov, who worked in the Far East, was the first to establish that this disease was encephalitis; he considered it to be Japanese encephalitis, already known at that time. In 1936, doctors at the Far Eastern Pasteur station, injecting mice with an emulsion of the brains of people who had died from encephalitis, tried to isolate the pathogen, but the attempt did not lead to success. It became clear that local doctors were unable to cope with this disease and help was needed from the center.

Many years later, Zilber recalled: “When the People’s Commissariat of Health of that time formed an expedition, he wanted to produce a complex group, which should have included 10 professors. I absolutely refused to participate in such an expedition and said that one thing or I will take on the whole responsibility and form an expedition, or arrange it as you see fit. After a big conversation, I was refused. But the Military Sanitary Department was vitally interested in the fight against encephalitis. Remember that time, it was a period of time not only of the widespread economic development of the Far East, but also the time when we were forced to hold large military units there, which were stationed right in the taiga. Therefore, the Military Sanitary Department turned to the People's Commissar of Defense, and by his direct order, I took sole charge of the expedition. I could select anyone for this expedition and act as we did considered necessary. I took only young shoots, and did it perfectly consciously. Of course, I collected them and warned them about the dangers and difficulties and everything else; the young people had a huge superiority in my eyes; they were not bound by old misconceptions regarding this disease. Before us, local neurologists claimed that this disease was Japanese summer encephalitis, and moreover, in our official documents, when we went to the Far East, it was written that we were going to study summer encephalitis. I wasn't convinced, so we made three scientific plans. The first project is for that incident, if it is truly summer encephalitis, the second project if it is some other encephalitis. And, in the end, the third project for the incident, if it is not encephalitis at all. These plans were developed in detail. From the very beginning I enforced parallelism in this work. The matter was set up in such a way that my employees were divided into two groups, which did the same thing in order to be confident in the result and in order to reduce research time. This organization, in those, of course, specific conditions when it was necessary to solve the problem very quickly, completely justified itself."

The rest was written immediately following the expedition. “On my first trip on May 19, 1937, with a group of employees to the taiga in the northern region of diseases, I was confronted with facts that forced me to hesitate the existing concept of the epidemiology of this disease. In a small hospital located in the taiga forest industry enterprise, I found medical records for the last three years. Their review showed that encephalitis occurs mainly in the spring and only people who work in the taiga and often do not have any contact with each other. These data were in no way consistent with the theory of contact or droplet infection. In the same taiga hospital on May 19, I found the patient encephalitis, who fell ill on May 4 and was already recovering by the time of my visit. She was the first sick person of this season, and establishing the source of her infection could be of decisive importance for subsequent research. The patient turned out to be a housewife who had not left the taiga for two years the village where she lived, and had no contact with either the patients or their families. For a long time it was not possible to determine at least some probability of the origin of this disease. It refuted the contact theory, summer seasonality, and the assumption that the disease could be transmitted by mosquitoes, since there were no mosquitoes in the area at that time. After a long questioning, the patient remembered that 1014 days before the disease, she collected last year’s pine nuts in the taiga and, upon returning home, found ticks embedded in her. This one fact, with which her illness could be associated, apparently attracted my attention." "I flew to Vladivostok to learn at least a little something about ticks (I didn’t understand anything about them then)... They helped me there, the truth is, only in the literature, and I found in the work of one veterinarian a curve of tick bites in cows, which perfectly coincided with the progression of the disease in humans, only with a delay of two weeks; it is clear that this was an incubation period." "The likelihood of transmitting the disease this way was so obvious to me that already at the end of May I sent a formation of doctors, including expedition staff, to the taiga to groups of people working only in the taiga, so that instruct them about the dangers of tick bites. It subsequently turned out that of these individuals, only a single man fell ill in 1937, although in previous years these were the most affected groups. Along with the collection of epidemiological data, an experimental revision of the tick theory was organized. The corresponding experiments, entrusted by me to M.P. Chumakov, were crowned with complete success, and he experimentally proved the probability of transmission of the disease by ixodid ticks. These and all subsequent works, especially subsequent extensive studies by Academician E.N. Pavlovsky and his collaborators, fully confirmed the theory I put forward about the transmission of the disease by ixodid ticks."

The tick system put forward by Zilber, substantiated by his collaborators and himself, amazes us, moreover, 65 years after these events with many circumstances related to it. The idea appeared on May 19, 1937, after two days (!) then the start of direct work in the outbreak of the disease, and after 20 (!) days: “I took upon myself the responsibility, writes Zilber, to propose at a meeting of local health authorities deliberately convened on June 10 radically change all measures to combat these diseases, focusing the main attention on anti-tick prevention." Only a man with a combination of many qualities: scientific intuition, decisive action, a sense of responsibility, quickness of thought, inner conviction, and humanity could, in previously fantastic times, overcome the path from a scientific hypothesis that arose practically out of nowhere to energetic practical measures to save people in taiga. Of course, here Zilber’s manner and disposition were fully revealed, all the time prone to “sweeping” generalizations. However, it would be wrong and naive to think that one patient, one insight, one guess ensured the success of the expedition. Lev Aleksandrovich himself believed that the preparation of research plays a huge role in scientific research. When I think about the role played by the preparation of research, I remember our expedition of 1937 all the way." Everything, from the most advanced apparatus to the last nail, was provided for when equipping the expedition; the only thing missing was tropical monkeys. And from Japan towards the expedition hastily purchased monkeys were sent in. They were needed for decisive experiments.

The tick doctrine answered the interrogative motive about the carrier of the disease and the ways of its spread, so that, in addition to its theoretical value, it had enormous practical significance. Of course, she did not answer the question about the nature of the causative agent of the disease: ticks, in principle, could carry bacteria, rickettsia, and viruses. Only scrupulously conducted experiments (it’s worth refreshing your memory that we are talking about wild taiga, off-road terrain, wooden houses, and not at all about sterile “boxes” and “laminar floors”!) could give a reaction to that very interrogative motive. Adhering to historical accuracy, let's give a word to the original source: "... the first lethal cases of the disease provided material with the help of which, at almost the same time, me and Shubladze in the south and Levkovich and Chumakov in the north isolated the causative agent of the disease, which turned out to be an ultravirus with some similarity with the viruses of Japanese and American encephalitis. Somewhat later, similar strains were isolated by Solovyov. In June and July 1937, Shubladze and I conducted experiments infecting monkeys with an emulsion of the brains of people who died from encephalitis and the passage virus obtained by that time. These experiments also confirmed the etiological the importance of the strains we isolated, but we were unable to neutralize these strains with sera from convalescents, that is, people who had suffered encephalitis, for a long time, which excluded the recognition of the isolated virus as the causative agent of the disease.Only after sera from later periods of convalescence were taken into experiments, did we get clear positive results, and it became clear that we have the causative agent of the disease in our hands."

And now we will give an assessment of the expedition’s work “from the outside.” Actually, the entire service for the study of taiga encephalitis was a feat of our scientists. The feat became, as it were, their everyday life. But I would like to say especially about some of the out-of-the-ordinary episodes, reminiscent of the heroism of the soldiers on the battlefield. Somehow, in the midst of work, heavy rains began. The raging river broke the dam. Water entered the vivarium where the animals were located. It was necessary to save them at all costs, to save everyone. Scientists declared an emergency. Working waist-deep in water, they pushed cages containing frightened mice and monkeys onto land. The animals were saved. Soon the doctor Chumakov fell ill. Despite severe muscle pain and weakness, he continued to work hard. But the temperature was creeping up. The first signs of brain disease appeared. Chumakov fell ill. His comrades were tense, but he calmed them down. “It’s nothing, it’ll be okay,” he said. “It’s my elderly rheumatism that has woken up.” However, this was not the case: he contracted encephalitis. Chumakov courageously looked danger in the eyes and asked his comrades for only one thing: to bring their common task to the end. Enormous freedom and power of spirit allowed M.P. Chumakov to resist the terrible disease. Another member of the expedition, V.D. Solovyov, still suffered encephalitis, fortunately, in a milder form.

It would not be out of place to cite the view of one of the leaders of the second expedition to the Far East (1938), A.A. Smorodintsev, later a leading virologist, academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (it dates back to 1984): “It must be said that there is a more suitable candidate, of course, than L. A. Zilber, at this time it was impossible to solve a previously complex problem”; “Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber literally went into the unknown and brilliantly substantiated the viral nature of the causative agent of tick-borne encephalitis.” This evidence is of particular value, because Smorodintsev not only knew well all the circumstances surrounding the 1937 expedition, but also disagreed with Zilber on many issues of general virology, which they openly discussed in the post-war years.

Zilber, with his characteristic laconicism, summed up the results of the expedition: “By August 15, the expedition’s service on site was completed. Within three months, we established the presence of a new, previously unknown form of encephalitis, isolated 29 strains of its causative agent, established the epidemiology of the disease and its carrier, in The clinical, pathological anatomy and histology of the disease were mainly studied. This luck was overshadowed by laboratory infections of employees... It is difficult to determine the circumstances under which they became infected. All usual preventive measures when working with infectious material were scrupulously carried out by all employees. The most dangerous experiments with nasal infection of monkeys were carried out personally by me with the help of Shubladze. It was impossible to assume that the virus had some kind of special extraordinary infectivity. After all, we were pioneers in this field, we were the first people on Earth who held in our hands that very previously unknown virus. Perhaps , that the relatively primitive conditions in which the service was carried out and the great fatigue from daily work of 12 or more hours for three months with a single day off during this time were of some importance. But I could not keep my employees from this hard work: they all worked with exceptional passion and genuine enthusiasm. In subsequent years, fatal infections occurred when working with our virus in Moscow in special virology laboratories, when deliberately developed measures were taken to prevent infections. These facts make us think about the unusually high infectiousness of our virus, and it is not surprising that the first acquaintance with it was not without casualties. They could have been much more significant."

It would seem that people who risked their lives almost hourly for three months have the right to at least believe in gratitude for what they did. However, it was 1937, and based on a monstrous, absurd and blasphemous denunciation, the leader of the expedition and two of his close employees, A.D. Sheboldaeva and T.M. Safonova, were arrested. In the absence of those arrested and without their names, the first scientific notice on the etiology of tick-borne encephalitis is published. A number of participants in the Zilber expedition, as well as leaders and participants in the second and third expeditions of 1938 and 1939. (E.N. Pavlovsky, A.A. Smorodintsev, P.A. Petrishcheva) were awarded the Stalin Prize 1st degree. Among the laureates there are no L.A. Zilber, A.D. Sheboldaeva, T.M. Safonova.

Lev Aleksandrovich never spoke about the period from 1937 to 1939, and yet Lefortovo, Lubyanka, Butyrki, Sukhanovo were rarely mentioned. For hundreds of thousands of citizens of our country, these names of prisons meant monstrous physical and mental suffering, almost inevitable death. Zilber went through all this without signing confessions to non-existent crimes. Many years later, he was at his annual medical examination, and a young woman doctor, looking at a photo of his chest, exclaimed: “Your ribs are broken! But it’s not written about this on the card.” “Yes,” answered Zilber, before the war I was in a serious car accident.” He was quite pleased with how cleverly he had deceived the trusting young woman.

In 1939 Zilber was released. We cannot state at the current moment what was decisive in this release: the absurdity of the accusations, the energetic and fearless actions of devoted friends, or the “change of shifts” in the NKVD, when instead of the bloody executioner Yezhov came the newly minted executioner Beria, who began his work with the release of a very petty some of the prisoners. Upon his release, Zilber published a classic, fundamental work on tick-borne encephalitis, written in the fresh wake of the expedition back in 1937, wrote a monograph on encephalitis, submitted it to the publishing house in December 1939. The book was typed and should be published next year, but in 1940 a second arrest followed. Fortunately, the only copy of this book has survived. It would have been desperately amazing, indeed, “abnormal,” if such a bright person as Lev Zilber had remained free at that time. What is amazing is how he survived, survived, preserved his intellect and will to life and scientific creativity. We think that Zilber was saved by the fact that he did not sign a confession of his “guilt”, despite the torture, and his friends, despite the terror of the NKVD, were not afraid to report in writing about his complete innocence. Of course, they committed a civil, heroic act, if we remember that it was wartime, and Zilber was accused of nothing less than “treason.” Therefore, Zilber’s deliverance, his return to freedom is not the result of “restoring the truth”, “admitting a mistake” by those who tortured him and kept him behind bars, but the extreme fruit of his courage, willpower, on the one hand, and friendly, professional solidarity on the other. This was not a gift of fate, but the outcome of the struggle of several people with the Stalinist death machine. This may be the main moral science of Zilber’s life, which has lasting, absolute value.

The question may arise: why, when talking about the discovery of the virus and vector of tick-borne encephalitis, did we use extensive quotes from Zilber’s works? The reason is simple: the history of this discovery has been distorted beyond recognition for a long time, and therefore we consider ourselves obliged, in the interests of scientific truth, to turn to the “testimony” of the main participant in the events.

In school textbooks of the 1950-1970s in biology, the discovery of an encephalitis carrier was associated only with the name of E.N. Pavlovsky, the surname of Zilber was not mentioned at all, although the names of some participants in the first expedition (M.P. Chumakov, E.N. Levkovich, V.D. .Soloviev, A.K.Shubladze) appeared here and there. Without in any way detracting from the value of the work of the expeditions of 1938 and 1939, it should be emphasized that the honor of the discovery of the virus as a new, independent posological unit and the honor of discovering the tick vector of the virus belong undividedly to the participants of the 1937 expedition. Subsequent expeditions fully confirmed its results , supplemented them, detailed them, deepened them, but did not refute them in any way. This is the historical truth.

Why do we consider the 1937 expedition led by Zilber a milestone in the history of Russian virology?

Firstly, then the discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus by D.I. Ivanovsky, who laid the foundation for virology as a science and, to the shame of Russia at that time and the Nobel Committee, which was not awarded the Nobel Prize, the discovery of the virus and vector of tick-borne encephalitis became the most striking achievement of domestic virology. Neither before nor later, unfortunately, there was a discovery so indisputable and significant in its scientific and practical consequences in the history of Russian virology.

Secondly, the expedition had a decisive impact on the creation of the domestic school of medical virologists, its rapid establishment and formation. Let us recall that the participants of the first expedition, M.P. Chumakov, A.K. Shubladze, E.N. Levkovich, V.D. Solovyov, became the leading virologists of the country, who later created their own scientific directions and trained their students. After this expedition in 1937, medical virology in the USSR received a strong impetus for development; a network of virological institutions emerged, which today play a significant role in domestic virology.

Thirdly, subsequent studies by Lev Alexandrovich himself and his students, as well as other researchers, proved that tick-borne encephalitis is not endemic to the Far East, but is distributed much more widely not only in Siberia, but also in Europe everywhere where ixodid ticks are found in nature . Therefore, the achievements of the participants in the 1937 expedition go far beyond the boundaries of the primary focus of the disease, where the first results were obtained, and have a much broader geographical role. Therefore, at the current moment, of course, one should deviate from the name “Far Eastern spring-summer encephalitis”, and in the future use the name “tick-borne encephalitis”, emphasizing its most important characteristic feature - the nature of the carrier.

Fourthly, the history of the first expedition is perhaps unique in how insignificantly small the interval was between research work and direct entry into practice. Long before the end of the expedition (although three months is a terribly short time for such complex work!) practical recommendations for the fight against ticks led to a sharp drop in the incidence of not only the population, but also military personnel, which in 1937-1939. saved thousands of lives.

The 1937 expedition is a textbook example of the effectiveness of fundamental science as a means of solving practical problems of the country.

While imprisoned (1937-1939, 1940-1944), Zilber served part of his sentence in the camps on Pechora. Here, in the conditions of the tundra, he created a powder against pellagra and saved the lives of hundreds of prisoners who were dying from complete vitamin deficiency (moreover, he received copyright confirmation for the invention, and this in the inhuman conditions of camp imprisonment!). During his second imprisonment, he worked in the so-called sharashka, a closed institution of the NKVD, in which arrested scientists worked under constant and vigilant control. Nevertheless, service in the “sharashka” was an outlet that allowed him to at least partially return to science, without which Lev Alexandrovich could not exist. As he later wrote, “circumstances were such that I had plenty of time to think.” Indeed, service in the Sharashka gave this possibility; they were not called in for interrogation or tortured there.

The end of the taiga epic can be considered the publication in 1946 of Zilber’s monograph, written six years earlier. It not only summarizes the skill of studying tick-borne encephalitis, but also considers the problem of epidemic encephalitis in general. This monograph was awarded the Stalin Prize, 2nd degree, in 1946. In the same year, the achievements of domestic virology in the study of tick-borne encephalitis became known to the English-speaking reader: a healthy review by Zilber, written jointly with V.D. Solovyov, was published.

Returning to his laboratory at the Central Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology (today the N.F. Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences), Lev Aleksandrovich expanded vipusological research, in particular on Western encephalitis, influenza, antiviral immunity, with all that the middle of it scientific interests are clearly shifting to the field of oncovirology.

Why does Zilber, who during his lifetime became a classic of infectious (epidemic) virology, who created the first and best school of medical virologists in the country, after this release from prison in March 1944, not return to the area where an easy existence awaited him, reaping well-deserved laurels and getting a haircut? coupons" from an outstanding opening? It seems to us that there were few reasons. Firstly, more than seven years of prisons and camps that followed the success of the 1937 expedition, and then the blatant falsification of the history of the discovery of tick-borne encephalitis, which until 1953 no one was in a hurry to correct, could not but cause severe moral trauma, moreover, to such a courageous man , like Zilber.

Secondly, paradoxically, tick-borne encephalitis was not in the plans of the Central Virus Laboratory; the task arose in response to the urgent need of practical medicine and the military. It did not fit into Zilber’s strategic plans, as he outlined them at a meeting of virologists in 1935. The taiga epic in this sense was a manifestation of the researcher’s passion, a thirst for fighting the unknown and danger, and was reminiscent of the suppression of the plague outbreak in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1930, which Zilber carried it out brilliantly and then spoke about it with his usual skill. In addition, tick-borne encephalitis was, in principle, defeated (shun ticks!), and Lev Aleksandrovich did not want to deal with details, it was quite uninteresting to him.

Thirdly, the prison experiences, which we will describe below, further strengthened his confidence that viruses and cancer were compatible concepts and amenable to experimental attack. As we have already mentioned, back in 1935, Zilber, in a report at a meeting of virologists, spoke about the viral theory of the origin of cancer.

Considering all these factors taken together, going into oncovirology and oncoimmunology seems logical for Zilber: the field is absolutely undeveloped, the difficulties seem insurmountable, the scientific community is skeptical; all this does not repel, but attracts Lev Alexandrovich. It cannot be said that Zilber was the first to stated the idea of ​​viruses as etiological factors in the occurrence of neoplasia. By that time, viruses capable of reviving tumors in animals and birds had been isolated: chicken sarcoma virus (P. Rous, 1911), rabbit papilloma virus (R. Shoup, 1932), mouse mammary gland tumor virus (J. Bitner, 1936). Naturally, in those years, experiments were carried out only on experimental animals; the use of tissue and cell culture appeared 15 years later. But where can you get these animals in prison conditions? Lev Alexandrovich finds a way out in one breath. He negotiates with the prisoners, and they begin to catch him mice and rats, of which there were plenty in the "sharashka", and he pays for this work with tobacco, given to the prisoners.

In the early 1940s, it was known that tumors in experimental animals could be activated by treatment with carcinogenic substances, several viruses, and the implantation of living tumor cells. What is Zilber doing? He induces tumors in rodents with carcinogens, and then uses cell-free extracts from these tumors, that is, destroyed cells passed through a Seitz filter, to try to induce tumors in adult mice. These experiments (with the exception of two) gave negative results, while cell homogenates that were not passed through the Seitz filter retained the ability to form tumors.

However, two cases attracted Zilber's sympathy. In one case, a small tumor nodule (“young” tumor) was found in a rat that died accidentally (and not as a result of the development of a tumor process), which was inoculated with cell-free extracts. The extract of this tumor, in turn, induced a tumor in another, recipient animal. In the second case, the probable viral agent was also present in the “young” tumor. All this led Zilber to think that the virus could only be present in tumors in the early stages (“young”). Thus, the virus only triggers the neoplastic course, and in the future the tumor cell does not need the virus. Lev Aleksandrovich tests a similar assumption using extracts of “young” tumors passed through a Seitz filter, which were obtained as a result of treatment with carcinogens. These cell-free extracts were administered to animals. The latter were treated with small doses of carcinogens that did not themselves cause tumor formation. Positive results noted in 15% of animals allowed Lev Aleksandrovich to formulate a new concept of the origin of tumors. In its original form (19441945), it was based on two main principles: tumors are of viral origin, but the virus performs only initiating functions in tumor progression.

Lev Alexandrovich believed that these ideas should be brought to the attention of researchers. He obtained an appointment with one of the high ranks of the NKVD and asked to publish his results in a scientific journal, even under a fictitious name. This was mockingly denied to him. Nevertheless, he managed (despite his vigilant observation) to express his thoughts in microscopic letters on tissue paper and, deceiving the vigilance of the jailers, convey the content to Z.V. Ermolyeva during a short meeting. In March 1944, on the eve of Zilber’s 50th birthday, he was released from places of detention. The reason for this, apparently, was a message about the scientist’s innocence sent to Stalin and signed by the Chief Surgeon of the Red Army N.N. Burdenko, Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences L.A. Orbeli, writer V.A. Kaverin (Zilber’s younger brother), biochemist V.A. Engelhardt and, of course, Z.V. Ermolyeva, who made enormous efforts to ensure that the message reached high offices. By that time, Z.V. Ermolyeva had organized a factory of domestic penicillin, and her name was widely known. The first thing Lev Aleksandrovich does after leaving prison is publishing his scientific concept in the Izvestia newspaper.

In the summer of 1945, he learns that his family (his wife, his wife’s sister and two sons), who spent three and a half years in German work camps, miraculously survived. Lev Alexandrovich finds and takes the family home. In 1945, he was elected a full member of the newly created Academy of Medical Sciences, he became the scientific director of the Institute of Virology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and headed the department of virology and tumor immunology of the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology named after. N.F. Gamaleya, where he worked for all subsequent years.

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« Happiness is in life, and life is in work.»

Zilber Lev Alexandrovichwas bornMarch 27, 1894in the village of Medved, Medved volost, Novgorod district, Novgorod province.

Father - Abel AbrAmovich Zilber - officer, bandmaster of the Omsk 96th Infantry Regiment, teacher of the Pskov (Orthodox) Theological Seminary, honorary citizen of Pskova.

Mother - Anna Grigorievna (nee Khanand GirShevna Desson), daughter of a bridge engineer, conservatory pianist, owner of music stores.
Sisters and brothers:

Miriam (1890 - after 1988) - married Mira Alexandrovna Rummel, married the firstDirector of the People's House named after. A. S. Pushkin Isaac Mikhailovich Rummel.

Leia (1892 - 1944) - married Elena Aleksandrovna Tynyanova, wife of the writer and literary critic Yu. N. Tynyanova.

David is a military doctor.

Alexander (1899 - 1970) - composer Alexander Ruchyev.

Veniamin (1902 - 1989) - writer Veniamin Kaverin.

Anna Grigorievna with her sons.

1912 - Leva graduated from the Pskov men's state gymnasium with a silver medal.

While studying at the gymnasium, he became friends (and these relationships remained for many years) with Yu. Tynyanov - later an outstanding literary critic, historian and writer, and A. Letavet - later a famous hygienist, academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.

Yuri Tynyanov, Lev Zilber, August Letavet - gymnasium students

1912 - Entered the natural sciences department of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of St. Petersburg University. He worked in the typhus department of a city hospital.

Yuri Tynyanov, Lev Zilber, Boris Mikhailov - students of St. Petersburg University. 1913

From student affairs. Director of the Pskov gymnasium. 28th November 1913

“Former student of the Pskov gymnasium Lev Zilber, now a student at St. Petersburg University in the natural department, graduated from the gymnasium with a silver medal. The teacher and class mentor of this young man, I was convinced that he had outstanding mental abilities and conscientiousness in the performance of his duties. If this young man succeeds to enter the medical faculty, which is his cherished dream, he will without any doubt become an excellent doctor, a useful figure in the state and society."

1915 - Passed the exams for four courses and transferred to the medical faculty of Moscow University, receiving permission to simultaneously attend classes in the natural sciences department. During the First World War he went to the front, and when he returned, he continued his studies at the university.

1917 - Passed the state exam for a full course as a biologist.

1918 - Graduated from bacteriological courses.

1919 - Received a medical degree.

1919 - Doctor at the Zvenigorod hospital, asked to go to the front as a sanitary doctor.

MANDATE

“This is given to the doctor of the IX Army L.A. Zilber that he is entrusted with the evacuation of sick and wounded Red Army soldiers from the city of Balashov and escorting the train to the destination station. All railway agents and institutions of the IX Army are ordered to assist him in unhindered promoting the standard.

Reference

B. Mikhailov - Member of the Revolutionary Military Council - 9

Being a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 9th Army, I can certify the following facts:

1. Doctor L.A. Zilber entered the Army as a volunteer in 1919, during the most difficult time of great failures at the front and a huge typhus epidemic.
2. In the Army, doctor Zilber was entrusted with responsible assignments (removal of a sick member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, comrade Beloborodov, from the rebel front, appointment with special powers to the city of Balashov, etc.).
3. Having been captured by the whites, Zilber saved two of our comrades from death there: having sent them false documents, he hid them in a medical train, then organized an escape.
Dr. Zilber showed selflessness in the most difficult, crucial moments of the fight against the whites.
Former Member of the Revolutionary Military Council - 9. B. Mikhailov

1921 - Demobilized and accepted the position of assistant in a bacteriological laboratory in one of the medical units of the front. Having started working in the bacteriological laboratory at the hospital, he proposed a new method of treating patients with typhus.

RSFSR, Kolomna District Council of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies

Certificate

"The bearer of this, citizen Zilber L.A., is the head of the Kolomna District Chemical and Bacteriological Laboratory."

RSFSR, People's Commissariat of Health

To the doctor, graduated in 1919, L.A. Zilber.

“Upon receipt of this, you are instructed to go to the disposal of the Microbiological Institute.”

1922-1929 - Work at the Institute of Microbiology of the People's Commissariat of Health (Moscow).

1923 - Discovery of hereditary transformation of bacteria.

At the congress in Berlin. 1927 From left to right: V. A. Engelgardt, Z. V. Ermolyeva, L. A. Zilber.

1928 - Marriage to Zinaida Vissarionovna Ermolyeva.

1930 - First arrest - Baku...

“To the Chairman of the Az. RIK. The plague has been diagnosed. Report to Moscow. The area is in danger. Strengthen the quarantine. I’m dying. Doctor Khudyakov.” (Winter 1930, Hadrut).
Zilber L.A.: “One night the People’s Commissar of Health of Azerbaijan called and said that several cases of plague had been noted in the town of Hadrut, and it was necessary to urgently go with employees to the outbreak.
“Here’s another thing,” he [the People’s Commissar] added, “in all reports write “ore” insteadthen "plague". There is no need for anyone to know about this." This is how this ridiculous encryption appeared.

But it was not possible to hide the epidemic from society. The head of the AzNKVD reproached the People's Commissar for the unsuccessful encryption:

"- I am for the lastdays... detained hundreds of telegrams from Baku saying that you have this “ore” here.
If you lie, you have to tell them a good lie."

Before that I knew nothing about the plague. At 12 o'clock at night I was called to the People's Commissariat of Health, and at 4 am with all the employees and equipmentwe were on the train. An outbreak of plague has occurred on one of the Republic's borders."
A group of doctors and scientists led by L.A. settled in a local school, since the Hadrut hospital turned out to be a hotbed of infection.
All patients, as well as those who had contact with them, and those who communicatedь with primary contactees, were isolated during the first hours of Zilber’s group’s stay in the outbreak.

"Already in the first days, strange circumstances became clear. The plague wouldla pulmonary, form of infection -drip, it can be eliminated immediately, you just need to interrupt the contact of the patient with healthy people and isolate those who have already been in contact. All this was quickly done... However, a second one arose andthird hearth.
One evening, an NKVD commissioner came to see Zilber.
"...The point is this. We have received very reliable information that saboteurs brought in from abroad are operating here. They open up plague-ridden corpses, cut out the heart and liver, and with these pieces they spread the infection.
“You know, comrade,” I answered, “the plague microbe is very easily grown on a feeder.”ny environments. In a few days you can get such a huge amount in the laboratorythese microbes were enough to infect hundreds of thousands of people. Why would saboteurs cut out organs from corpses?"

The Commissioner did not want to “discuss these issues” andinvited L.A. for the exhumation of corpses. Everything happened at night in an atmosphere of secrecy so as not to incur the wrath of the superstitious “native” population.
“...And at night, by the light of torches, we opened the grave of those who died from the plague, and imagine my not only surprise, but simply horror, when in the third or fourth grave the corpse turned out to have its head cut off, no liver, spleen, heart. such corpses. What could this mean?
The population in this area is backward, religious, contact is difficult... What would you do in my situation?
There was no need to think about sabotage; any saboteur could have a culture of the plague bacillus if he wanted to use it for evil...
But in one of the villages there was a man who spoke a little Russian and told me that in their area there is a legend: if families begin to die, then the first person to die is alive. You need to bring a horse to his grave, and if the horse eats oats, what kind of horse wouldn’t eat oats! - the deceased is alive, his head must be cut off and his heart and liver given to his relatives. And there everything is related to each other.
Well, this sad picture immediately became clear to me. After all, the plague microbe persists in organs for years.
How to eliminate this outbreak? I had to be responsible for a huge region that supplied grain to a number of industrial areas.
I had to think hard... We stripped the entire population of the area naked and moved them to tents, fortunately it was warm there. Special military teams treated all buildings, clothing, absolutely everything with chloropicrin. And so, after keeping the entire area in isolation for two weeks, we eliminated the plague."

The People's Commissar of Health ordered the burning of the Hadrut hospital (a solid stone building, a replacement for which may not be built at all in these places), despite Zilber's assurances that the hospital had been disinfected three times, including with chloropicrin. Telegrams came again and again: burn! and...aaand
Then L.A., inviting his bacteriological detachment to immediately move to live in the hospital, gave a telegram to the People's Commissar: “The bacteriological detachment has moved to the hospital to prove the complete safety of the building. I urge you to cancel the order for burning.” Saved the hospital And...

Before leaving for Baku, Zilber’s closest employee fell seriously ill, and then he himself. The train cars where they were located were cordoned off. Patients unsuccessfully searched for “non-plague” symptoms.
Zilber had a conversation with his old, devoted employee:
“- Elena Ivanovna!.. Here is morphine,” I handed her a small bag, “feed me with it if there really is a plague. There are more than five lethal doses. It’s quite enough to die without suffering.”
However, it was not necessary to use morphine, since the temperature dropped, which does not happen with the plague, and clear signs of tularemia were revealed. The train left for Baku...
While still on the road, L.A. informed the People's Commissar about the success of the case, and was greeted as a hero in Baku.

“The People's Commissar of Health greeted me kindly. He shook my hand and thanked me. He said that I was being nominated for the Order of the Red Banner and was being chosen as a candidate for the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.”

The People's Commissar took him to the Central Committee, introduced him to the secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, and Zilber, the 36-year-old chief of the Tropical Institute, was immediately made a candidate member of the Central Executive Committee and presented with the Order of the Red Banner.
“Fate would have it that I received the promised order only thirty-five years later, on the day of my seventieth birthday; well, I quickly dropped out of the members of the AzCEC as an “enemy of the people.”

According to the NKVD version, the epidemic was the work of enemy saboteurs who obtained the corpses of those who died from the plague and distributed parts of their bodies throughout the territory of the republic. To test the “sabotage” hypothesis, we found out whether there were strangers among the sick people. It turned out not.
Already in Baku it was possible to find out the cause of the epidemic. In old medical journals, Zilber found information about several plague outbreaks in areas neighboring Hadrut, and this year, due to incomplete grain harvesting, rodents from plague-prone areas migrated to Hadrut.

There was no sabotage, but it was ... Zilber who was accused of sabotage upon his return to Baku. They say that he brought plague bacteria with him from the expedition in order to infect the population of Azerbaijan.

The investigation has begun...

A week later, at the end of January 1930, Zilber sat on a screwed-down stool and, clenching his fists, with an unexpected spot under his eye, argued until he was hoarse that there was no way he could spread the plague in Hadrut. Nonsense, game, delusional absurdity! Zilber, furious and calming down again, tries to explain the habits of the terrible microbe, the meaning of the plague wiring.
But the investigator friendly advised him to confess. In the fourth month I realized: this was not a mistake, not a prosecutor’s mistake, but they were simply making a false accusation against him, they wanted to take revenge on him, the savior of Hadrut, for the Hadrut plague. After all, someone has to answer... It is not so important in whose head this idea matured, but, having arisen, it immediately became convenient for everyone: the sanitary service remained impeccable, the Azerbaijani leaders absolved themselves of responsibility for the all-Union emergency, and the GPU... what Well, the GPU, as always, exposed the saboteur. Only Zilber remained dissatisfied and completely rejected this version.

He was taken to Moscow. Here the investigation quickly came to an end, and he was already preparing to appear before the Extraordinary Troika, without having signed a single charge.

He was saved by the intercession of Maxim Gorky. Lev Zilber’s younger brother, writer Veniamin Kaverin, addressed the famous writer with a letter. Kaverin later described this in the novel “Open Book” - Doctor Andrei Lvov is none other than L.A. Zilber.

All charges were dropped and Zilber walked out of the Lubyanka gates.

There were no reports or denunciations in his file - there was no “CASE”! But the acquaintance took place. leaving this house, he understood. that they won’t forget about him here.

He never returned to Baku.

May 1930 - Awarded without defense the title of professor and the scientific degree of Doctor of Science at the Moscow Institute for Advanced Medical Studies.
1931 - 1933 - Work at the microbiological institutes named after. L.A. Tarasevich and them. I. I. Mechnikov in Moscow (1932 - Deputy Director for Science of the Institute of Infectious Diseases named after I. I. Mechnikov). He taught a course in infectious diseases at the Central Institute for Advanced Medical Studies.

1932 - Led the fight against the smallpox epidemic in Kazakhstan.
1934 - 1937 - Created and directed the first Central Virus Laboratory of the People's Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR in the USSR.

At the Institute of Microbiology of the USSR Academy of Sciences he organized a virology department.
Academician Gamaleya: “Zilber’s anti-plague vaccines turned out to be tens of times more effective than all others ever proposed here and abroad...”

1935 - Marriage to Valeria Petrovna Kiseleva.
December 1935 - Delivered a keynote speech at the All-Union Conference on the problem of ultraviruses. In this report, he quite clearly formulated the prospect of a virological approach to the problem of the origin of tumors (the idea of ​​a viral theory of the origin of cancer).

May - August 1937 - Expedition of the NKZ USSR.

May 5, 1937 No. 1-17
“This is given to Professor Zilber Lev Aleksandrovich in that he is the head of the Far Eastern Special Purpose Expedition of the People's Commissariat of Health of the USSR (NKZ USSR).

We request all organizations and institutions to provide prof. Zilber receives all assistance in fulfilling the tasks assigned to him."

A. A. Smorodintsev, leading virologist, academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences: “It must be said that at that time it was impossible to find a more suitable candidate, of course, than L. A. Zilber for solving such a complex problem. Lev Alexandrovich literally walked into the unknown and brilliantly substantiated the viral nature of the causative agent of tick-borne encephalitis."
Zilber L.A.: “By August 15, the work of the expedition on site was completed. Within three months, we established the existence of a new, previously unknown form of encephalitis, isolated 29 strains of its causative agent, established the epidemiology of the disease and its carrier, and mainly studied the clinic , pathological anatomy and histology of the disease. The tick-borne encephalitis virus was discovered.”

Pravda newspaper: Article “Victory of Soviet medicine.”

Presentation to the Order of the Red Banner.
NKZ RSFSR, October 21, 1937
Reference
"Given to Professor L.A. Zilber that he is the director of the Central Virus Laboratory."
November 1937 - Second arrest...
1937 - 1939 - Imprisonment - Lefortovo, Lubyanka, Butyrki, Sukhanovo...

Part's nominee, the director of the institute, Muzychenko, refused to accept the material brought by the expedition. He stated that the presence of viral strains within the walls of the institution he heads is fraught. It is unclear where they are obtained and, most importantly, what they are intended for.
And he wrote a denunciation in which he informed the “authorities” that the “Zilberites” were poisoning wells, killing horses, and under the guise of fighting encephalitis, they contributed to its spread. which led to a steady increase in the number of cases and deaths.
Zilber was accused of treason, espionage and acts of sabotage. They interrogated me with passion. For refusing to give the evidence required by the investigation, he was twice placed in the “torture” Sukhanovskaya prison.
Despite the pressure, Lev Zilber did not sign the interrogation report. And he pleaded not guilty to any of the charges brought against him.
The investigator decided not to press too hard. He believed that, no matter whether the arrested scientist was charged with three articles or only one, he could not avoid execution.
The investigator focused on acts of sabotage. And he referred the case to the tribunal.
At the trial, Lev Zilber denied all the charges brought against him.
After consulting for some time, the court rendered its verdict: ten years without the right to correspondence.
Walking past the judges under escort, Lev Zilber said derogatorily:
"Someday the horses will laugh at your sentence!"

After the verdict was passed, he was placed in one of the camps near Kotlas. The first year I cut down the forest.
Then the camp authorities decided to use Lev Zilber in his specialty - he was assigned as a doctor to the camp hospital.
Zilber's relatives - younger brother Veniamin Kaverin, friend, writer Yuri Tynyanov, and his ex-wife, Zinaida Ermolyeva, tried with all their might to achieve his release.
In the summer of 1939, Lev Zilber was released.

1939 - 1940 - Creation of a new virology laboratory at the CIEM of the People's Commissariat of Health. RSFSR, later IEM named after. N. F. Gamaleyi of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences - headed the department of immunology and virology of malignant tumors of the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology.
“Zilber returned to us, not much broken, not depressed, and almost didn’t talk about what had happened,” recalled his employee Nartsissov. “He had so many new ideas that everything else faded into the background.”
1940 - Third arrest...

In the summer of 1940, they came for Lev Zilber again. Perhaps Muzychenko did not let up. Perhaps the investigative authorities decided that they were in a hurry with the release.

“In December 1940, I was sitting in cell No. 36 on the third floor of the Lubyanka internal prison...”
Consequence. Harsh pressure in response to refusal to admit guilt. During interrogations, my kidneys were broken, my ribs and my arm were broken. And a new deadline.

They were sent to the North, beyond the Arctic Circle, to PechorLAG.
This was the most difficult imprisonment - he almost died from exhaustion and overwork. His medical education also saved the day: he successfully delivered the child of the camp commander’s wife and soon became the head of the infirmary, where he created a small scientific laboratory.
Treats prisoners from pellagra (total vitaminosis with fatal outcome).
600 people saved in PechorLAG. Thanks to the NKVD.

Zilber L.A.: “While in one of the northern camps, I learned that reindeer moss - reindeer moss - contains a lot of carbohydrates, and organized a fairly significant production of yeast, using appropriately processed reindeer moss as a medium for their reproduction. Yeast was a very important product in our conditions, mainly as a source of vitamins. When administered subcutaneously, they had a very beneficial effect on severe vitamin deficiencies and dystrophies, of which there was no shortage. My yeast has saved many lives. I learned how to extract alcohol from moss so as not to waste scarce grain and potatoes on it.”

1944 - Copyright certificate for Antipellagrin.

DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

Class ZOA, 3
L. A. Zilber

To copyright certificate No. 73348

"Method of obtaining antipellagrin."
Declared February 14, 1944

People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR No. 1970 (331460).

So the prisoner Zilber, with the help of the NKVD, patented a new drug.
With the permission of his superiors, he organized a conference of camp doctors, at which he spoke about how to deal with pellagra.
While the application was going through its stage, the NKVD decided that it was not reasonable to keep a scientist on such a large scale in the northern forests at the height of hostilities. Zilber was transferred near Moscow to the Zagorsk Prison Institute for Special Purposes.
Zilber L.A.: “After two or three days I was called and offered to work in a bacteriological laboratory. I refused.This was repeated twice more. They persuaded and threatened. I refused categorically. We were kept for two weeks with criminals... They called us again. I refused again."

They sent me to the chemical sharashka. “The circumstances were such that I had enough time to think.” And he began searching for the causes of cancer.
Developed the concept of the occurrence of cancerous tumors. This was a new word in oncology - the viral theory of cancer, which subsequently gained worldwide fame.
March 1944 - Release from prison.

Zilber L.A. : “After all, my enemies tried to destroy me and my friends always saved me. And the happiness of my life, I remained alive only thanks to friends and relatives.

1941 - Family deported to Germany - Valeria Petrovna with two children and sister Anastasia. They spent three and a half years in German work camps.

07/30/1945 - Finding a family - trip to Germany, meeting with family in the Breslau transit camp. Happy return to Moscow.

Zilber's children subsequently became famous scientists: Lev Lvovich Kiselev (1936-2008) - molecular biologist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Fedor Lvovich Kiselev - molecular biologist, specialist in carcinogenesis, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences.

01/17/1945 - Newspaper "Izvestia": Article "The Problem of Cancer", in which Zilber L.A. popularly outlined his concept. "Cancer is a disease of the genome."
1945 - Election as a full member of the newly created Academy of Medical Sciences. Scientific director of the Institute of Virology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and head. Department of Virology and Tumor Immunology, Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology named after. N.F. Ga-maley, where he worked all subsequent years.

1946 - Presentation of the Stalin Prize for a book about encephalitis.

1945 - 1950 - Creation of a national school of virologists-oncologists. Development of a viral theory of the origin of cancer. Academician - Secretary of the Department of Virology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.

1952 - The times of the “Doctors’ Plot” and the fight against cosmopolitanism.” Speech at the board of the USSR Ministry of Health about experimental work (together with Lev Aleksandrovich they were carried out by Z.L. Baidakova and R.M. Radzikhovskaya) on the creation of an anti-cancer vaccine and experiments on human anti-tumor vaccination. Support of the Minister of Health General E.I. Smirnov. The department's work was immediately classified and saved. Soon after the end of the “doctors’ case,” he achieved the discovery and publication of research.
1957-1962 — Work on immunodiffusion analysis.

Zilber L. A. is the author of the scientific discovery “New properties of the pathogenicity of tumor viruses,” which is included in the State Register of Discoveries of the USSR under No. 53 with priority dated May 27, 1957.
1958 - Letter to the editor...
“Our work “Etiology of spring-summer epidemic encephalitis” was published in the journal “Archive of Biological Sciences”, vol. 52, 1938.
Due to circumstances beyond our control, L.A. was not named among the authors. Zilber, who was an active participant in the work and leader of the expedition. A.D. is also not named among the authors. Sheboldaeva...
Thus, the authors of this work are L. A. Zilber, E. N. Levkovich, A. K. Shubladze, M. P. Chumakov, V. D. Solovyov and A. D. Sheboldaeva.
We request all researchers to take into account the above.
E. N. Levkovich, A. K. Shubladze, V. D. Solovyov, M. P. Chumakov
1961 - Creation (on the basis of its department at the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology named after N. F. Gamaleya of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences) of the first department of general immunology and oncology in the Soviet Union, organizing in it a laboratory of antibody biosynthesis, antibody chemistry and immunological tolerance.

1962 - VIII International Anti-Cancer Congress in Moscow.
L.A. Zilber is one of the main participants and organizers of the congress.

1964 - The Institute solemnly celebrates the 70th anniversary of Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber.
1965 - International Symposium on Cancer Immunology in Sukhumi.
L.A. Zilber is the soul and organizer of this symposium.

Academician Zilber created a scientific school,new direction in immunology and virology. He was a member of the oncology associations of America, France and Belgium, a member of the English Royal Society of Medicine, and an honorary member of the New York Academy of Sciences. Organizer and Chairman of the Committee on Virology and Immunology of Cancer at the International Union Against Cancer, WHO expert on immunology and virology. The Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences awarded him a medal for services to science and humanity and elected him an honorary member of the Purkinje Society.Awarded the Order of Lenin and the Red Banner of Labor.

"I would like to die here on my feet", Zilber once said in the laboratory.

And so he lay at his desk, and students stood nearby, empty ampoules, a syringe and an already unnecessary bottle of Valocardine were lying around.

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Comments:
Benny
Toronto, Canada - at 2017-01-09 16:40:55 EDT
Science was the main thing. This was the meaning of their life.
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A slightly different opinion:
"... the main thing for him was that he saved people. Under any circumstances..."

Benny
Toronto, Canada - at 2017-01-09 16:39:57 EDT
Science was the main thing. This was the meaning of their life
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A slightly different opinion:
"... the main thing for him was that he saved people. Under any circumstances..."

THE HAPPY LIFE OF LEV ZILBER
https://www.evrey.com/sitep/person/print.php?menu=280 Yu. Notkin
- at 2017-01-09 14:24:47 EDT
The most striking thing in the life of L. Zilber, of course, is not whether Sam and Usam really suddenly showed towards him something similar to a human appearance. It is quite possible that this is a legend. But what was amazing in that era was the very existence of people like L. Zilber, not just exceptionally talented, but selflessly devoted to their work, to science, capable of creating even in monstrous conditions, and there were quite a few of them.
The courage of those who dared to fight for their salvation and even write letters in their defense, even letters to Himself, is also amazing. It is shameful and unfair to consider them all today as idiots - romantics who were zombified by communist nonsense and had no idea who and what was hidden behind it, and what threatened them.
Even to live, albeit not as heroic a life as L. Zilber’s brother, V. Kaverin, but to be visible and not be stained by meanness, not to sign where many colleagues signed or to sign where few signed, when Usatii was no longer there, but it was fraught with disgrace and even ostracism; it is worthy of memory and respect. Sergey Chevychelov
- at 2016-12-01 13:34:29 EDT
I read it with interest and learned a lot of new things. Thank you!

Regarding the presentation of the prize by Stalin to L. Zilber, let me cite my recent post.

Sergei Chevychelov kissed
- 2016-08-30 12:02:49(922)

Stalin and virology
- 2016-08-30 03:21:43(906)

In the summer of 1945, Lev Zilber found and brought to the USSR a family - his wife, his wife’s sister and two sons who had survived in German work camps, where they spent three and a half years. In the same year, an out-of-the-ordinary event occurred: Stalin personally apologized to the scientist and presented him with a prize in his name. History does not remember another such case, when the all-powerful generalissimo asked for forgiveness from an intellectual “erased into camp dust,” a beaten, broken, but not broken intellectual...
////////////////////MF////////////////////////
The earliest date this material was posted on the Internet was May 1, 2015, the author Sergey Protasov does not provide any links. In August 2015, this material was duplicated by MK and transferred to Wikipedia (that's the price of Wikipedia!). There are many inaccuracies in the material, which dramatically deprives it of credibility. The Stalin Prize, 2nd degree, was awarded to Lev Zilber in 1946 (in December 1946 - the birthday of the luminary of science) for 1945 for the monograph "Encephalitis". The prize was awarded in the second half of March 1947. It is very unlikely that it was Stalin who presented the prizes at that time (he became seriously ill with dysentery in March 1947). It is also unlikely that he apologized when presenting the prize (who apologizes when he gives it, especially Stalin, especially a prize for a book, 2nd degree, and even among 26 other laureates. It is interesting that in one publication it is written: Stalin presented the prize to Zilber , thereby as if apologizing - more plausible). So there really wasn't a case.
End of quote.

My advice to you is to call this episode a family legend. Legends embellish the image even more than facts. Otherwise, provide evidence.

The life of Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber (1894-1966) covered, of course, the most tragic period in the history of Russia, which included the events of the Russo-Japanese War, the revolution of 1905, two revolutions of 1917, two world and civil wars, Stalin’s terror of the 30-50s years, the Gulag, the VASKhNIL session (1948), the Pavlovsk session (1950), the “Doctors’ Plot” (1952), rampant anti-Semitism, the fight against cosmopolitanism. Only two short periods of his life can be considered relatively normal: before 1917 and after 1953, and between these dates there were seven and a half years of prisons and camps.

We will begin our essay about the tragic (and happy!) fate of the scientist with a brief description of his personality, because this will allow us to understand his creative path much better. Decades of daily communication with L.A. Zilber give us the right to do this.

Lev Alexandrovich was a passionate person, who devoted himself to any cause, to any idea, which captured him entirely, without reserve, with incredible energy, pressure, impatience and fury. There was nothing in his life that he did out of duty, out of service, half-heartedly, somehow. He had a favorite expression, not very correct from the point of view of normative grammar, but very characteristic of him: “As it should be.” This could concern the experiment, which should be carried out “as it should be,” and the water supply in the dacha, which he did “as it should be,” and in general everything around him.

It would seem that the passion of nature and irrepressible vital energy should give rise to haste, haste, and reluctance to do the same thing for a long time. In fact, Zilber had rare patience and perseverance in achieving goals, although it took years. Thus, the last 20 years of his life were spent searching for an impeccable proof of the virogenetic theory of tumor development that he developed.

Lev Aleksandrovich set goals for himself that were never private, narrow, or secondary; he was never interested in “sewing the last button to a sewn uniform” (Zilber’s expression). He was attracted to goals that were either simply invisible to others or seemed unattainable. This maximalism, reluctance to work in established areas of science, abrupt departure from one area and invasion into another, which at first looked irrational, actually followed an internal logic, where the leading factors were the romance of the unknown, the resistance of the material, and the difficulty of achieving results.

When there were no more difficult tasks left for him in microbiology and bacteriology, as he then believed, he went into virology, which at that time simply did not exist as an established science, and this is what attracted him. When medical infectious virology as a science took shape, it already became uninteresting for Zilber, and he began to build non-infectious oncovirology. Changing not the directions in one science, but the sciences themselves, he carried through his entire life a constant attachment to immunology. From his first steps in science under the leadership of V.A. Barykin* until his last years, when he worked on a vaccine against tumors, his fascination with the problems of immunity did not weaken, and he used immunological methods all his life. It seems to us that this is also no coincidence. Immunology is one of the most complex areas of biology and medicine, which throughout the 20th century. remained the focus of researchers' attention. Of course, immunology is one of the most, so to speak, biological disciplines among many life sciences, bordering on medicine, and if we use modern terminology, it was biomedicine that was the core of the entire scientific life of Zilber, who had two completed higher educations - natural science ( Petersburg University) and medical (Moscow University). It is interesting that he was born into a family of musicians, where there was not a single person of science before him, and his father categorically objected to his entering the university, since he certainly wanted to make his son a violinist. Zilber’s virological interests literally grew out of his work on microbiology, since and bacteria and viruses, coexisting in higher organisms, should, according to Lev Alexandrovich, interact with each other, and this interaction could be both symbiotic and antagonistic. The experiments began with studying the adsorption of the smallpox vaccine virus in vitro on yeast cells (together with E. Vostrukhova, and later with A. Belyaeva). It has been demonstrated that living yeast cells are capable of adsorbing significant amounts of vaccinia virus. Zilber's collaborators observed a similar phenomenon in experiments with other viruses and found that, in addition to yeast, some bacteria and protozoa (single-celled eukaryotes) can also adsorb viruses.

All this data led Lev Aleksandrovich to the concept that postulated the symbiosis of viruses and microbes. It was called virophoria, and in a broader sense - allobiophoria (Zilber's term). Lev Aleksandrovich emphasized that this phenomenon has not only general biological, but also important practical significance, since it can seriously affect the epidemiology of some viral infections. He believed that in some cases the virus penetrates the cells of microorganisms and multiplies in them, since experiments indicated this possibility. These views of Zilber were so ahead of their time that for a long time they found themselves outside the field of view of contemporary researchers.

The development of domestic virology, especially medical, was powerfully stimulated by the All-Union Conference on the Problem of Ultraviruses (1935). At the meeting, Zilber gave a keynote address, where the role of viruses was considered in the broadest theoretical and practical terms - in biology, medicine, and agriculture. Amazingly, already in this report he formulated quite clearly the prospect of a virological approach to the problem of the origin of tumors. Moreover, it mentioned the possibility of the existence of foreign antigens in tumors as markers of the presence of tumor-derived viruses. The report indisputably shows that upon entering virology, Zilber was already concerned with the problems of virology and cancer immunology.

At the same time, he created the Central Virus Laboratory of the People's Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR. The laboratory became the first independent virological institution in our country, whose forcedly brief (1934-1937) and brilliant existence remained forever in the history of Russian science. At the Institute of Microbiology of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Lev Alexandrovich organized the virology department. It is characteristic that Zilber always strived for the harmonious development of virology both as a part of biology and as a part of medicine. In the laboratory the emphasis was on the medical aspects of virology, and in the department on general biology. This approach, laid down by Zilber, is still preserved in Russian virology, in the works of famous virologists. In the works of the Central Virus Laboratory, the scientist’s integral approach to virological problems was clearly demonstrated: not just viruses (primarily the influenza virus) are studied, but also immunity to them . Silber's extensive knowledge in the field of immunology finds here a new application to extremely poorly studied objects. The most important task of the first virological institutions in the country was training. Lev Aleksandrovich always preferred to work with young people who were full of enthusiasm and able to easily perceive new ideas and methods. The laboratory consisted of very young people, and their leader was only 40 years old. The turning point in the history of domestic medical virology and in the fate of the majority of the employees of the Central Virus Laboratory, the triumph and tragedy of its leader Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber, was the legendary expedition to the Far East in 1937. Since the beginning of the 30s, in a number of places in the Far East, doctors discovered severe acute diseases , often ending in the death of patients, as the central nervous system was affected. The disease was completely unstudied and was classified by local doctors as “toxic flu.” In 1935, doctor A.G. Panov, who worked in the Far East, first established that this disease was encephalitis; he considered it to be Japanese encephalitis, already known at that time. In 1936, doctors at the Far Eastern Pasteur station, injecting mice with an emulsion of the brains of people who had died from encephalitis, tried to isolate the pathogen, but the attempt did not lead to success. It became clear that local doctors were unable to cope with this disease and help was needed from the center.

Many years later, Zilber recalled: “When the People’s Commissariat of Health of that time formed an expedition, he wanted to create a comprehensive group, which should have included 10 professors. I decisively refused to participate in such an expedition and said that one thing or I’ll take it upon myself full responsibility and form an expedition, or arrange it as you see fit. After a big conversation, I was refused. But the Military Sanitary Department was vitally interested in the fight against encephalitis. Remember that time - it was a period of not only widespread economic development of the Far East, but also a time ", when we were forced to keep large military units there, which were stationed right in the taiga. Therefore, the Military Sanitary Department turned to the People's Commissar of Defense, and by his direct order, I took sole charge of the expedition. I could select anyone for this expedition and work as we considered it necessary. I took exclusively young people, and did it quite deliberately. Of course, I gathered them and warned them about the dangers and difficulties and everything else; young people had a huge advantage in my eyes - they were not bound by old misconceptions regarding this disease. Before us, local neurologists claimed that this disease was Japanese summer encephalitis, and even in our official documents, when we went to the Far East, it was written that way - that we were going to study summer encephalitis. I wasn't convinced, so we made three scientific plans. The first plan is in case it is really summer encephalitis, the second plan is if it is some other encephalitis. And finally, the third plan - in case it is not encephalitis at all. These plans were developed in detail. From the very beginning I enforced parallelism in this work. The matter was set up in such a way that my employees were divided into two groups, which did the same thing in order to be confident in the result and in order to reduce research time. This system, in those, of course, specific conditions when it was necessary to solve the problem very quickly, completely justified itself."

The rest was written immediately after the expedition. “On my first trip on May 19, 1937, with a group of employees to the taiga in the northern region of diseases, I was confronted with facts that forced me to question the existing concept of the epidemiology of this disease. In a small hospital located in the taiga of the timber industry enterprise, I found medical records for the last three years. Their review showed that encephalitis occurs mainly in the spring and only people who work in the taiga and often do not have any contact with each other. These data were in no way consistent with the theory of contact or droplet infection. In the same taiga hospital on May 19, I found the patient encephalitis, who fell ill on May 4 and was already recovering by the time of my visit. She was the first patient of this season, and establishing the source of her infection could be decisive for subsequent research. The patient turned out to be a housewife who had not left the taiga village for two years, where she lived, and had no contact with either patients or their families.For a long time it was not possible to establish at least some probability of the origin of this disease. It refuted the contact theory, summer seasonality, and the assumption that the disease could be transmitted by mosquitoes, since there were no mosquitoes in the area at that time. After a long questioning, the patient remembered that 10-14 days before the illness, she collected last year’s pine nuts in the taiga and, upon returning home, found ticks embedded in her. This only fact with which her illness could be associated naturally attracted my attention." "I flew to Vladivostok to learn at least a little something about ticks (I didn’t understand anything about them then)... They helped me there, True, only in the literature, and I found in the work of one veterinarian a curve of tick bites in cows, which completely coincided with the curve of the increase in the disease in humans, only with a delay of two weeks; it is clear that this was an incubation period." "The likelihood of transmitting the disease this way was so obvious to me that already at the end of May I sent a number of doctors, including expedition staff, to the taiga to groups of people working exclusively in the taiga to instruct them about the dangers of tick bites. It subsequently turned out that of these individuals only one person became ill in 1937, although in previous years these were the most affected groups. Along with the collection of epidemiological data, an experimental test of the tick theory was organized. The corresponding experiments that I entrusted to M.P. Chumakov were crowned with complete success, and he experimentally proved the possibility of transmission of the disease by ixodid ticks. These and all subsequent works, especially subsequent extensive studies by Academician E.N. Pavlovsky and his collaborators, fully confirmed the theory I put forward about the transmission of the disease by ixodid ticks."

The tick theory put forward by Zilber, substantiated by his colleagues and himself, amazes us even 65 years after these events with many circumstances associated with it. The idea appeared on May 19, 1937 - two days (!) after the start of direct work in the outbreak of the disease, and already 20 (!) days later: “I took upon myself the responsibility,” writes Zilber, “to propose at a specially convened meeting on June 10 local health authorities will radically change all measures to combat these diseases, focusing on tick-borne prevention." Only a person with a combination of many qualities - scientific intuition, decisive action, a sense of responsibility, quickness of thought, inner conviction, humanity - could, in such a fantastic time, go from a scientific hypothesis that arose literally out of nowhere to energetic practical measures to save people in taiga. Of course, here the style and character of Zilber, always prone to “swift” generalizations, were fully revealed. However, it would be wrong and naive to think that one patient, one insight, one guess ensured the success of the expedition. Lev Aleksandrovich himself believed that the preparation of research plays a huge role in scientific research. When I think about the role played by the preparation of research, I always remember our expedition of 1937." Everything, from the most advanced apparatus to the last nail, was provided for when equipping the expedition; the only thing missing was tropical monkeys. And from Japan they arrived to meet the expedition Urgently purchased monkeys were sent in. They were needed for crucial experiments.

The tick theory answered the question of the carrier of the disease and the ways of its spread, so that, in addition to its theoretical value, it had enormous practical significance. Of course, she did not answer the question about the nature of the causative agent of the disease: ticks, in principle, could carry bacteria, rickettsia, and viruses. Only carefully conducted experiments (it is worth recalling that we are talking about wild taiga, off-road conditions, wooden houses, and not at all about sterile “boxes” and “laminar floors”!) could provide an answer to this question. Adhering to historical accuracy, we will give the floor to the original source: “... the first lethal cases of the disease provided material with the help of which, almost simultaneously, me and Shubladze in the south and Levkovich and Chumakov in the north isolated the causative agent of the disease, which turned out to be an ultravirus with some similarities to the Japanese viruses and American encephalitis. Somewhat later, similar strains were isolated by Solovyov. In June and July 1937, Shubladze and I conducted experiments infecting monkeys with an emulsion of the brains of people who died from encephalitis and the passage virus obtained by that time. These experiments also confirmed the etiological significance of the strains we isolated , but we were unable to neutralize these strains with the sera of convalescents, that is, people who had suffered encephalitis, for a long time, which excluded the recognition of the isolated virus as the causative agent of the disease.Only after sera from later periods of convalescence were taken into experiments, we obtained clear positive results, and It became clear that we had the causative agent of the disease in our hands."

Now let’s give an assessment of the expedition’s work “from the outside.” “Actually, all the work on studying taiga encephalitis was a feat of our scientists. The feat became, as it were, their everyday life. But I would like to say especially about some of the out-of-the-ordinary episodes, reminiscent of the heroism of soldiers on the battlefield. Somehow, in the midst of work, heavy rains began. The raging river broke the dam. Water entered the vivarium - the room where the animals were kept. It was necessary to save them at all costs, to save everyone. Scientists declared an emergency. Working waist-deep in water, they pushed cages containing frightened mice and monkeys onto land. The animals were saved. Soon Doctor Chumakov fell ill. Despite severe muscle pain and weakness, he continued to work. But the temperature was creeping up. The first signs of brain disease appeared. Chumakov fell ill. His comrades were overcome with anxiety, but he calmed them down. “It’s nothing, it’ll be okay,” he said. “It’s my old rheumatism that has woken up.” However, this was not the case: he contracted encephalitis. Chumakov courageously looked danger in the eyes and asked his comrades for only one thing - to bring their common cause to the end.” Great will and fortitude allowed M.P. Chumakov to resist the terrible disease. Another member of the expedition, V.D. Soloviev, also suffered encephalitis, fortunately, in a milder form.

It is worth citing the opinion of one of the leaders of the second expedition to the Far East (1938), A.A. Smorodintsev, later a leading virologist, academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (it dates back to 1984): “It must be said that a more suitable candidate, of course, than L. A. Zilber, at that time it was impossible to find a solution for such a complex problem"; “Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber literally went into the unknown and brilliantly substantiated the viral nature of the causative agent of tick-borne encephalitis.” This evidence is of particular value, since Smorodintsev not only knew well all the circumstances surrounding the 1937 expedition, but also disagreed with Zilber on many issues of general virology, which they openly discussed in the post-war years.

Zilber, with his characteristic laconicism, summed up the results of the expedition: “By August 15, the work of the expedition on the spot was completed. Within three months, we established the existence of a new, previously unknown form of encephalitis, isolated 29 strains of its causative agent, established the epidemiology of the disease and its carrier, in The clinical, pathological anatomy and histology of the disease were mainly studied. This success was overshadowed by laboratory infections of employees... It is difficult to establish the circumstances under which they became infected. All usual preventive measures when working with infectious material were carefully carried out by all employees. The most dangerous experiments with nasal infection of monkeys were carried out personally by me with the help of Shubladze. It was impossible to assume that the virus had any special extraordinary infectivity. After all, we were pioneers in this field, we were the first people on Earth who held this previously unknown virus in our hands. Perhaps that the relatively primitive conditions in which the work was carried out and the great fatigue from daily work of 12 or more hours for three months with only a single day off during this time were of some importance. But I could not keep my employees from this hard work: they all worked with exceptional passion and genuine enthusiasm. In subsequent years, fatal infections occurred when working with our virus in Moscow in special virology laboratories, when specially developed measures were taken to prevent infections. These facts make us think about the unusually high infectiousness of our virus, and it is not surprising that the first acquaintance with it was not without casualties. They could have been much more significant."

It would seem that people who literally risked their lives every hour for three months have the right to at least count on gratitude for what they did. However, it was 1937, and based on a monstrous, absurd and blasphemous denunciation, the leader of the expedition and two of his close employees, A.D. Sheboldaeva and T.M. Safonova, were arrested. In the absence of those arrested and without their names, the first scientific report on the etiology of tick-borne encephalitis is published. A number of participants in the Zilber expedition, as well as leaders and participants in the second and third expeditions of 1938 and 1939. (E.N. Pavlovsky, A.A. Smorodintsev, P.A. Petrishcheva) were awarded the Stalin Prize 1st degree. Among the laureates there are no L.A. Zilber, A.D. Sheboldaeva, T.M. Safonova.

Lev Aleksandrovich almost never talked about the period from 1937 to 1939, but Lefortovo, Lubyanka, Butyrki, Sukhanovo were occasionally mentioned - for hundreds of thousands of citizens of our country, these names of prisons meant monstrous physical and mental suffering, almost inevitable death. Zilber went through all this without signing a confession to non-existent crimes. Many years later, he was at his annual physical, and a young woman doctor, looking at a picture of his chest, exclaimed: “Your ribs are broken! It’s not written about that on the card.” “Yes,” Zilber answered, “before the war I was in a serious car accident.” He was very pleased with how cleverly he had deceived the trusting young woman.

In 1939 Zilber was released. We cannot say now what was decisive in this release: the absurdity of the accusations, the energetic and fearless actions of devoted friends, or the “change of shifts” in the NKVD, when instead of the bloody executioner Yezhov, a new executioner came - Beria, who began his activities with the release of a very small part prisoners. Upon his release, Zilber published a classic, fundamental work on tick-borne encephalitis, written in the fresh wake of the expedition back in 1937, wrote a monograph on encephalitis, submitted it to the publishing house in December 1939. The book was typeset and should be published next year, but in 1940 a second arrest followed. Fortunately, one copy of this book has survived. It would have been extremely surprising, one might even say “abnormal,” if such a bright personality as Lev Zilber had remained free at that time. Another amazing thing is how he survived, survived, retained his intellect and will to life and scientific creativity. We think that Zilber was saved by the fact that he did not sign a confession of his “guilt”, despite the torture, and his friends, despite the terror of the NKVD, were not afraid to declare in writing his complete innocence. Of course, they accomplished a civic feat, if we remember that it was wartime, and Zilber was accused of nothing less than “treason.” Therefore, Zilber’s salvation, his return to freedom, is not the result of “restoring the truth”, “admitting a mistake” by those who tortured him and kept him behind bars, but the end result of his courage, willpower, on the one hand, and friendly, professional solidarity with another. This was not a gift of fate, but the outcome of the struggle of several people with the Stalinist death machine. This is perhaps the main moral lesson of Zilber’s life, which has lasting, absolute value.

The question may arise: why, when talking about the discovery of the virus and vector of tick-borne encephalitis, did we use extensive quotes from Zilber’s works? The reason is simple: the history of this discovery has long been distorted beyond recognition, and therefore we consider ourselves obliged, in the interests of scientific truth, to turn to the “testimony” of the main participant in the events.

In school textbooks of the 1950-1970s in biology, the discovery of an encephalitis carrier was associated only with the name of E.N. Pavlovsky, the surname of Zilber was not mentioned at all, although the names of some participants in the first expedition (M.P. Chumakov, E.N. Levkovich, V. D. Soloviev, A. K. Shubladze) appeared here and there. Without in any way detracting from the value of the work of the expeditions of 1938 and 1939, it should be emphasized that the honor of the discovery of the virus as a new, independent posological unit and the honor of discovering the carrier of the virus - the tick - belong undividedly to the participants of the 1937 expedition. Subsequent expeditions fully confirmed its results, They supplemented them, detailed them, deepened them, but did not refute them in any way. This is the historical truth.

Why do we consider the 1937 expedition led by Zilber a milestone in the history of Russian virology?

Firstly, after the discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus by D.I. Ivanovsky, who laid the foundation for virology as a science and, to the shame of Russia at that time and the Nobel Committee, which was not awarded the Nobel Prize, the discovery of the virus and the vector of tick-borne encephalitis became the most striking achievement of domestic virology. Neither before nor after, unfortunately, there has been a discovery so indisputable and significant in its scientific and practical consequences in the history of Russian virology.

Secondly, the expedition had a decisive influence on the formation of the domestic school of medical virologists, its rapid formation and development. Let us recall that the participants of the first expedition - M.P. Chumakov, A.K. Shubladze, E.N. Levkovich, V.D. Solovyov - became the leading virologists of the country, who later created their own scientific directions and trained their students. After the 1937 expedition, medical virology in the USSR received a powerful impetus for development, and a network of virological institutions emerged that now play a significant role in domestic virology.

Thirdly, subsequent studies by Lev Alexandrovich himself and his students, as well as other researchers, proved that tick-borne encephalitis is not endemic to the Far East, but is distributed much more widely - not only in Siberia, but also in Europe - wherever it occurs in nature ixodid ticks. Therefore, the achievements of the participants in the 1937 expedition go far beyond the primary focus of the disease, where the first results were obtained, and have a much wider geographical significance. Therefore, now, of course, we should abandon the name “Far Eastern spring-summer encephalitis”, and in the future use the name “tick-borne encephalitis”, emphasizing its most important characteristic feature - the nature of the carrier.

Fourthly, the history of the first expedition is perhaps unique in how insignificantly small the interval was between research work and direct entry into practice. Long before the end of the expedition (although three months is a very short time for such complex work!) practical recommendations for the fight against ticks led to a sharp drop in the incidence of not only the population, but also military personnel, which in 1937-1939. saved thousands of lives.

The 1937 expedition is a textbook example of the effectiveness of fundamental science as a means of solving practical problems of the country.

While imprisoned (1937-1939, 1940-1944), Zilber served part of his sentence in the camps on Pechora. Here, in the conditions of the tundra, he created a drug against pellagra and saved the lives of hundreds of prisoners who were dying from complete vitamin deficiency (he even received an author's certificate for the invention - and this in the inhuman conditions of camp imprisonment!). During his second imprisonment, he worked in the so-called sharashka - a closed institution of the NKVD, in which arrested scientists worked under constant and vigilant control. Nevertheless, work in the “sharashka” was an outlet that allowed him to at least partially return to science, without which Lev Alexandrovich could not exist. As he later wrote, “circumstances were such that I had enough time to think.” Indeed, working in the “sharashka” provided this opportunity; they were not called in for interrogation or tortured there.

The completion of the taiga epic can be considered the publication in 1946 of Zilber’s monograph, written six years earlier. It not only summarizes the experience of studying tick-borne encephalitis, but also considers the problem of epidemic encephalitis in general. This monograph was awarded the Stalin Prize, 2nd degree, in 1946. In the same year, the achievements of domestic virology in the study of tick-borne encephalitis became known to the English-speaking reader: a large review by Zilber, written jointly with V.D. Solovyov, was published.

Returning to his laboratory at the Central Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology (now the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology named after N.F. Gamaleya of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences), Lev Aleksandrovich expanded his vipusological research, in particular on Western encephalitis, influenza, antiviral immunity, but the center of his scientific interests was clearly shifts to the field of oncovirology.

Why did Zilber, who during his lifetime became a classic of infectious (epidemic) virology, who created the first and best school of medical virologists in the country, after his release from prison in March 1944, not return to the area where an easy life awaited him as a reaper of well-deserved laurels and “cutting coupons” "with an outstanding discovery? It seems to us that there were several reasons. Firstly, more than seven years of prisons and camps that followed the success of the 1937 expedition, and then the blatant falsification of the history of the discovery of tick-borne encephalitis, which until 1953 no one was in a hurry to correct, could not but cause severe moral trauma even to such a courageous person, like Zilber.

Secondly, paradoxically, tick-borne encephalitis was not in the plans of the Central Virus Laboratory; the problem arose in response to the urgent need of practical medicine and the military. It did not fit into Zilber’s strategic plans, as he outlined them at a meeting of virologists in 1935. The taiga epic in this sense was a manifestation of the researcher’s passion, a thirst for fighting the unknown and danger, and was reminiscent of the suppression of the plague outbreak in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1930, which Zilber carried it out brilliantly and then spoke about it with his characteristic skill. In addition, tick-borne encephalitis was, in principle, defeated (avoid ticks!), and Lev Aleksandrovich did not want to deal with details, it was simply not interesting to him.

Thirdly, the prison experiences, which we will describe below, further strengthened his confidence that viruses and cancer are compatible concepts and amenable to experimental attack. As we have already mentioned, back in 1935, Zilber, in a report at a meeting of virologists, spoke about the viral theory of the origin of cancer.

Considering all these factors taken together, going into oncovirology and oncoimmunology seems logical for Zilber: the field is completely undeveloped, the difficulties seem insurmountable, the scientific community is skeptical - all this does not repel, but attracts Lev Alexandrovich. It cannot be said that Zilber was the first, who expressed the idea of ​​viruses as etiological factors in the occurrence of neoplasia. By that time, viruses capable of causing tumors in animals and birds had been isolated - chicken sarcoma virus (P. Rous, 1911), rabbit papilloma virus (R. Shoup, 1932), mouse mammary tumor virus (J. Bitner, 1936). Naturally, in those years, experiments were carried out only on experimental animals; the method of tissue and cell culture appeared 15 years later. But where can you get these animals in prison conditions? Lev Alexandrovich quickly finds a way out. He negotiates with the prisoners, and they begin to catch him mice and rats, of which there were plenty in the "sharashka", and he pays for this work with tobacco, given to the prisoners.

In the early 1940s, it was known that tumors could be induced in experimental animals by treatment with carcinogens, several viruses, and the implantation of living tumor cells. What is Zilber doing? He induces tumors in rodents with carcinogens, and then uses cell-free extracts from these tumors, that is, destroyed cells passed through a Seitz filter, to try to induce tumors in adult mice. These experiments (with the exception of two) gave a negative result, while cell homogenates that were not passed through the Seitz filter retained the ability to form tumors.

However, two cases caught Silber's attention. In one case, a small tumor nodule (“young” tumor) was found in a rat that died accidentally (and not as a result of the development of a tumor process), which was inoculated with cell-free extracts. The extract of this tumor, in turn, induced a tumor in another, recipient animal. In the second case, a possible viral agent was also present in the “young” tumor. All this led Zilber to believe that the virus could only be present in early stage (“young”) tumors. Thus, the virus only starts the neoplastic process, and in the future the tumor cell does not need the virus. Lev Aleksandrovich tests his assumption using extracts of “young” tumors passed through a Seitz filter, which were obtained as a result of treatment with carcinogens. These cell-free extracts were administered to animals. The latter were treated with small doses of carcinogens that did not themselves cause tumor formation. Positive results noted in 15% of animals allowed Lev Aleksandrovich to formulate a new concept of the origin of tumors. In its original form (1944-1945), it was based on two main principles: tumors are of viral origin, but the virus performs only initiating functions in tumor progression.

Lev Alexandrovich believed that these ideas should be brought to the attention of researchers. He obtained an appointment with one of the high ranks of the NKVD and asked to publish his results in a scientific journal, even under a fictitious name. This was mockingly denied to him. Nevertheless, he managed (despite his vigilant observation) to express his thoughts in microscopic letters on tissue paper and, deceiving the vigilance of the jailers, convey the text to Z.V. Ermolyeva during a short meeting. In March 1944, on the eve of Zilber’s 50th birthday, he was released from places of detention. The reason for this, apparently, was a letter about the scientist’s innocence, sent to Stalin and signed by the Chief Surgeon of the Red Army N.N. Burdenko, Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences L.A. Orbeli, writer V.A. Kaverin (Zilber’s younger brother), biochemist V.A. Engelhardt and, of course, Z.V. Ermolyeva, who made enormous efforts to ensure that the letter reached high offices. By that time, Z.V. Ermolyeva had organized the production of domestic penicillin, and her name was widely known. The first thing Lev Aleksandrovich does after leaving prison is to publish his scientific concept in the Izvestia newspaper.

In the summer of 1945, he learns that his family (his wife, his wife’s sister and two sons), who spent three and a half years in German work camps, miraculously survived. Lev Alexandrovich finds and takes the family home. In 1945, he was elected a full member of the newly created Academy of Medical Sciences, he became the scientific director of the Institute of Virology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and headed the department of virology and tumor immunology of the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology named after. N.F. Gamaleya, where he worked for all subsequent years.

In 1946, Zilber clearly formulated his concept of the origin of tumors, the main provisions of which are as follows:

"...the role of the virus in the development of the tumor process comes down to the fact that it changes the hereditary properties of the cell, transforming it from normal to tumor, and the tumor cell thus formed serves as a source of tumor growth; the virus that caused this transformation is either eliminated from the tumor due to the fact that the altered cell is an unsuitable environment for its development, or loses its pathogenicity and therefore cannot be detected during further tumor growth...

It is quite possible that a principle similar to that which operates during the serological transformation of microbes also operates during the transformation of viruses... It can also be assumed that the mutation that occurs when a normal cell turns into a tumor cell is determined by the genetic apparatus of the cell...

In tumors, the main pathological process is not caused by a virus, whose role is to transform a normal cell into a tumor cell, but by the tumor cell itself, which gives rise to the tumor...

If some non-tumor viruses and other infectious agents are capable of causing cell proliferation, this does not mean that they are capable of causing hereditary changes in the properties of the cell. The latter ability is inherent only in tumor viruses and the nature of their effect on the cell is fundamentally different from the nature of the effect of infectious agents, which cause mainly inflammatory and necrotic changes..."

Zilber's theory was virogenetic, although he gave it this name a little later. Thus, Lev Aleksandrovich, back in 1946, very clearly formulated the fundamental principles of the theory of oncogenesis: tumors can be caused by viruses that change the hereditary apparatus of the cell and serve only as an initiating factor in the transformation of a normal cell into a transformed one, without themselves directly participating in the occurrence of a tumor.

The provisions of Zilber's theory, especially those concerning the interaction of the virus and the genetic apparatus of the cell, were so new and original that for more than ten years this concept could not be tested experimentally due to the lack of adequate methodological approaches. In search of the latter, Lev Aleksandrovich came up with the idea of ​​using immunological markers to identify oncoviruses and their protein products in human tumors. In fact, Zilber and his collaborators were pioneers in a new field of immunology - the discovery of specific tumor antigens. Over time, Lev Aleksandrovich paid more and more attention to the search for direct evidence of the virogenetic theory of cancer, and more specifically, evidence of the integration of the tumor virus genome with the cell genome. It was in this integration that he saw the specific differences between tumor-producing viruses and infectious ones; it was precisely this integration that, as Zilber believed, contained the critical event leading to the tumor transformation of a cell infected with a virus. He sought to focus his laboratory's work on discovering this integration and sought to solve problems at the molecular level. This belief ultimately turned out to be correct. The final proof of the integration of the viral and cellular genomes was the discovery of reverse transcriptase by G. Temin and D. Baltimore and the experiments of R. Dalbeko in identifying viral DNA as an integral part of cellular DNA in tumors. All these scientists became Nobel laureates. But this was later, and the very first direct evidence of integration was obtained in experiments on somatic hybridization of “virus-free” tumors, initially caused by a virus, with cells sensitive to these viruses. The road that led to this evidence ran through the discovery of the pathogenicity of the Rous chicken sarcoma virus for mammals, which was made in 1957 by L.A. Zilber and I.N. Kryukova and at the same time G.Ya. Svet-Moldavsky and A. Skorikova. Like any genuine discovery, it had a peculiar history.

In 1954, Peter Medawar came to Moscow with lectures on tolerance, which he had just discovered. Both his lectures and he himself - a lord and a handsome man, a brilliant lecturer - made a strong impression in Moscow. Embryologist Kryukova, who had recently started working with Lev Alexandrovich, attended Medawar’s lecture and spoke about the discovery of immunological tolerance at a laboratory conference. Zilber, then absorbed in the search for specific antigens in tumors, decided to use tolerance for these purposes. The introduction of normal tissue antigens to rats and rabbits during the prenatal period was supposed to suppress their formation of antibodies to “normal” antigens, without affecting the ability to respond with antibodies to specific antigens of malignant tumors.

The results of the work were reported on May 6, 1957 at a conference at the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology. N.F. Gamaleya and published in the same year. Administration of the Rous chicken sarcoma virus to rat embryos followed by its administration to newborn rat pups causes the development of hemorrhagic disease in them, characterized by vascular damage, pinpoint and diffuse hemorrhages, and the formation of multiple cysts filled with serous and later hemorrhagic contents. In some cases, tumors formed from cysts. The effect was clearly caused by the Rous virus, since only one strain of the virus produced it. The resulting cysts did not contain Rous virus. At the same time, Svet-Moldavsky and Skorikova, injecting Rous sarcoma homogenate into rats, obtained real sarcomas from them, also not containing the virus (see).

The main conclusion for the authors of these works was the surmountability of interclass barriers for the tumor virus. This was completely new and unexpected and raised the question of the possible role of animal viruses in the occurrence of human tumors, as is now assumed in the case of mad cow disease. There was no infectious component in the cysts and tumors. Antibodies to Rous sarcoma did not react with homogenates of cysts or tumors, that is, no traces of the virus were found in the tumors they caused.

Lev Aleksandrovich drew a very important conclusion from this: the virus that causes tumors can “disappear” in the emerging tumor or remain in it in a masked state. But this position had already been expressed by him earlier; it only confirmed and expanded his previous views.

The pathogenicity of the chicken virus for mammals was such a strange and unexpected phenomenon that it gave rise to many people's desire to reproduce it in other animals. J. Svoboda from the Institute of Genetics in Prague - a student of M. Hasek, one of the discoverers of tolerance - received a number of tumors in rats caused by the Rous virus, and tried in various ways to revive the original virus in them. Among his unsuccessful attempts was the injection of cell-free tumor homogenates or irradiated tumor homogenates into chickens. Only one of the tumors, sarcoma CS, gave rise to tumors in chickens when a cell suspension was administered. Moreover, co-cultivation of living (not killed!) cells led to foci of transformation in vitro: the Rous virus was detected in the resulting tumors. Svoboda called CS a virogenic tumor. He suggested that the virus in the tumor is contained in a “latent” form, but when co-cultivated with cells sensitive to it, single particles of the mature virus infect chicken cells. Moreover, Svoboda suggested that viral activation may occur in rare somatic hybrids of KS sarcoma and virus-sensitive chicken cells. These data closely led to the conclusion that in HS sarcoma the genomes of the virus and the cell are integrated. But how does the RNA Rous virus integrate with the DNA genome? Reverse transcriptase has not yet been discovered. There were four years left before this event.

Shortly after Zilber's sudden death, P. Gerber's research on the “release” of the SV40 DNA virus from “virus-free” tumors caused by this virus was published (see). Gerber used the technique proposed by Harris to obtain hybrids of somatic cells: exposure of a cell suspension to the symplast-forming Sendai virus, which causes the fusion of the membranes of a wide variety of cells, followed by the formation of two nuclear heterokaryons, which do not lose viability and the ability to further divide. He applied this technique to hamster sarcomas caused by SV40, fusing them with sensitive cells and stimulating the “release” of the virus. At the same time, exactly the strain of the virus that originally caused this sarcoma was “released,” which had not detected the virus for many generations. The same was shown for “virus-free” rat tumors generated by the Rous sarcoma virus. Almost 60 years have passed since the appearance of the virogenetic concept of the origin of tumors in its original version - a period sufficient to objectively assess its significance for the development of oncology and biology in general. It must be emphasized that as a whole the theory turned out to be correct. Its main provisions, such as the ability of viruses to cause tumors, the integration pathway of interaction between the viral and cellular genomes, and the initiating role of viruses in carcinogenesis, turned out to be valid.

The significance of a particular theory for the progress of scientific research can be assessed in different ways, for example, how the theory contributed to the development of a certain field of science during the period of its creation and the attraction of a new galaxy of researchers to this area, or to what extent the main ideas of the theory turned out to be promising and ensured the emergence of new fundamental experimental and theoretical approaches and directions. In the 50-60s of the last century, Zilber’s confidence that viruses can cause tumors was so unconventional and “infectious”-romantic that many researchers gradually came under his banner. Oncovirology in the USSR received a powerful impetus - new laboratories appeared.

It is quite obvious that the evolution of our views on the mechanisms of cancer, which led to the modern idea that cancer is a disease of the cell genome, is based on Zilber’s virusogenetic concept, its key idea about the molecular mechanism of carcinogenesis as the effect of a virus on the genetic apparatus of the cell. The second cardinal question of the virogenetic theory is the role of viruses in the occurrence of all tumors. The discovery of numerous tumor-producing viruses in most animal species studied, including endogenous retroviruses, has convincingly confirmed the correctness of this prediction.

For humans, the question of the role of viruses in carcinogenesis is becoming increasingly important. Convincing evidence has been obtained that some viruses are directly associated with human tumors (in terms of frequency of occurrence, they account for approximately a quarter of all human tumors). These are cervical cancer, the etiological agent of which is several types of human papilloma viruses, liver cancer, in which an integrated genome of the hepatitis B virus has been identified, Burkitt's lymphoma and nasopharyngeal cancer, where, apparently, the Epstein-Barr virus acts as an etiological agent in the chain of events , leading to tumor development, herpes virus type 8, associated with Kaposi's sarcoma, as well as adult T-cell leukemia virus. Modern oncovirology is rapidly developing thanks to the invasion of molecular biological approaches into oncology, the importance of which Lev Aleksandrovich wrote many times in the last years of his life.

It is necessary to recall another extremely important direction in modern oncovirology, which is also closely related to Zilber’s research - the creation of vaccines against cancer. In the 1960s, Lev Aleksandrovich actively worked on this problem, but it was not possible to solve it then. Today the situation has changed, vaccines have been created against hepatitis B viruses and human papilloma viruses, and there is a very high probability that these vaccines will be effective in preventing liver cancer and cervical cancer.

Virologist L.A. Zilber rightfully stands among the biologists of whom Russian science is proud - geneticist N.I. Vavilov, biologist N.K. Koltsov, physiologists I.P. Pavlov and I.M. Sechenov, immunologist I. I. Mechnikov, radiobiologist and geneticist N.V. Timofeev-Resovsky, virologist D.I. Ivanovsky.

Outstanding Russian microbiologist, founder of a large domestic school of microbiology, director of the Microbiological Institute of the People's Commissariat of Health of the RSFSR in the 1920-1930s

20 years later, the co-authors of this work wrote a letter to the editors of the journal “Questions of Virology”, where they asked to restore the historical and scientific truth and cite the authors of this article, starting with Zilber and ending with Sheboldaeva.