Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber (; March 27 [O.S. March 15], 1894 – November 10, 1966) was a Soviet micro-biologist, virologist, and immunologist; academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (AMN SSSR; 1945), founder of the Soviet school of virology. The elder brother of the writer Veniamin Kaverin.
Biography
Zilber was born on March 15 [O.S. March 27] 1894 in the family of the kapellmeister Abel Zilber and his wife, née Khana Girshevna (Anna Grigorievna) Desson, pianist and owner of music stores. Place of birth – the village of Medved, Medved volost, Novgorod Governorate. His sister Leya (married Elena Aleksandrovna Tynyanova, 1892–1944) is the wife of the writer and literary critic Yury Tynyanov, a classmate of Lev Zilber. His younger brothers: military doctor David Zilber (1897–1967), composer and conductor Alexander Ruchiov (1899–1970) and writer Veniamin Kaverin (1902–1989).
Career
In 1912, Zilber graduated from the Pskov provincial gymnasium with a silver medal and entered the natural department of the Faculty of physics and mathematics of St. Petersburg Imperial University. In 1915 he transferred to the medical faculty of Moscow University, having received permission to attend classes at the natural department at the same time and graduated from it in 1919.
Having left in 1919 as a volunteer for the front he served in the Red Army in various positions from a doctor to the head of the medical unit. He was taken prisoner by the whites, but successfully escaped. Since 1921, he worked at the Institute of microbiology of the People's Commissariat for Health in Moscow.
In 1928 he married with Zinaida Yermolyeva. The first months after the wedding Zilber and Yermolyeva spent working at the Pasteur Institute in France and the Robert Koch Institute in Germany. In 1929, he was sent by the People's Commissar for Health N. Semashko to suppress an outbreak of typhoid fever in the city of Dzerzhinsk near Nizhny Novgorod.
First arrests
In 1929, he accepted an offer to take the position of director of the Azerbaijan Institute of microbiology and head of the department of microbiology at the Medical University in Baku. He led the suppression of an outbreak of plague in the villages of Bulutan and Hadrut in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1930. Upon his return to Baku, he was introduced to the Order of the Red Banner, but was soon arrested on charges of sabotage to infect the population of Azerbaijan with plague. He was released after 4 months (possibly, at the request of Maxim Gorky, who was approached by the younger brother of Lev Zilber, writer Veniamin Kaverin, perhaps due to the efforts of his ex-wife Zinaida Yermolyeva). Upon his release, Zilber worked in Moscow heading the department of microbiology at the Central Institute for the Improvement of Doctors and head of the microbiological department of the State Scientific and Control Institute of the People's Commissariat for Health of the RSFSR named after Lev Tarasevich.
In 1932, he led the elimination of an outbreak of smallpox in Kazakhstan and in 1935 he also married with Valeria Petrovna Kiseleva.
In 1935–1936 he achieved the creation of the Central Virus Laboratory under the People's Commissariat for Health of the RSFSR and the opening of a department of virology at the Institute of Microbiology of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
In 1937, he led the Far Eastern expedition of the People's Commissariat for Health of the USSR to study an unknown infectious disease of the central nervous system. During the work of the expedition the nature of the disease – tick-borne encephalitis was clarified and methods of dealing with it were proposed.
Immediately upon his return, he was arrested on denunciations of an attempt to infect Moscow with encephalitis and concealment of the fact that encephalitis was brought into the USSR by Japanese saboteurs. In June 1939 he was released. Zilber participated in the struggle for his release. His brother Kaverin, Ermolyeva, colleagues on the Far Eastern expedition A. K. Shubladze, Mikhail Chumakov, V. D. Solovyov and many others participated in the struggle for his release.
In 1939, he became the head of the virology department at the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology, which he led until his death in 1966 with a break during the third arrest (1940–1944).