Клетка и жизнь - Коллектив авторов -- Биографии и мемуары

lecture

Graham DUNN. Professor, King’s College London, Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics.

Этот текст является конспектом лекции, посвященной памяти Ю. М. Васильева, которую Грэхем Данн, ученик и сотрудник Майкла Аберкромби, прочел на Аберкромбиевской конференции, состоявшейся в 2017 г. (год смерти Ю. М. Васильева).

Не always used to joke with me that he wasn’t photogenic.

The joke was that although he was a leading scientist at All-Union Cancer Research Centre of the USSR in Moscow, possibly THE leading scientist, with a lab of about 40 people, he almost never appeared in the Centre’s official group photographs.

The reason I guess was that all intellectual Jews in Soviet Russia were treated as potential dissidents. This made life very difficult and collaboration with West almost impossible but, as we shall see, Yuri was very adept at skirting round these problems.

His chief weapon was humour which is why he loved telling jokes. And one reason why we all loved him. But quite remarkably, Yuri did very good science by any international standards.

The paper was significant for drawing attention to the role of microtubules in cell polarity and the direction of cell locomotion — a theme he spent much of the rest of his life working on. It had over 170 citations by 1988 — very good for the time.

Also in Yuri’s group was his good friend Israel Gelfand (Volodya’s father) who was professor of mathematical biology at Moscow State University.

Things in Moscow then were never quite what they seemed and although Gelfand was considered to be among the top half dozen best mathematicians in the world, he never applied mathematics to biology. Biology was separate for him and was something of a political escape route.

Yuri wrote in his comments to «Cytation Classics» paper: «At the time of this research our group worked in almost complete isolation. We first met Michael Abercrombie (from Cambridge) and other leading specialists on cell behaviour during the Moscow Embryology Conference held in August 1969. It was a great moral support for us when Michael approved our results and recommended their prompt publication».

This meeting was how the lifelong collaboration all began — the Moscow Embryology Conference in 1969 — where Yuri met Michael and also Michaels good friend John Trinkaus (Trink) who was professor of embryology at Yale.

Michael said that the «interests and experience of this group are the closest of any in the world to those of my own».

But it all nearly went badly wrong at the first meeting. As usual, at these official soviet meetings there was a lot of vodka and toasts at the conference dinner all were expected to propose a toast. Trinkaus, always the gentleman, thought to flatter his hosts by proposing a toast to the glorious Soviet Union and long may it prosper. But, of course, a lot of Russians weren’t at all keen on it prospering and Gelfand leant towards Yuri and whispered «I cant drink this toast». Yuri said, «You must, they’re our guests, the rules of hospitality are more important».

And so, Yuri’s tact and diplomacy, equal to Michael’s, saved the day.

Michael and Yuri met again in Moscow in 1973 and somehow Michael persuaded the Soviet authorities to let Yuri attend Michael’s meeting on the locomotion of tissue cells in London — that’s when I first met Yuri.

More amazingly, they subsequently managed to get a project on cell behaviour included in this cooperation which eventually started in the same year as Michael’s death.

Yuri insisted that I take over as UK coordinator of the project and this official photo was taken at the signing in 1980.

One of the first results was that Yuri came for 1st Abercrombie conference in 1982 at UCL organised by Ruth Bellairs and Adam Curtis and me. Adam Curtis also sadly died last month (written in 2017).

Surprisingly they were allowed to come without a minder as they were expected to mind each other. But we took Yuri away to visit Cambridge after the meeting — shock — we thought he had defected — but he turned up 4 hours later with a big grin on his face.

During the program Yuri was able to come to the first three Abercrombie meetings.

We had to arrange 10 man-weeks per year of reciprocal visits. So many memories come flooding back of my many trips to Soviet Moscow, that I don’t know where to begin.

There was the time when we were all invited to a formal dinner party by Terry Garret, the Scientific Attache to the British Embassy, and I think Vasiliev asked this pompous bore called Brigadier Bitties what he did. «Military Intelligence» he replied curtly, whereupon Peter Hollenbeck (who was Dennis Brays postdoc at the time) said «My old grandpappy always said that military intelligence is a contradiction in terms». While Bitties grew puce-colored, the whole room fell into a deathly silence until Garret, being a true British diplomat, started to complain about the price of meat in Moscow. In the taxi afterwards Zaitsev, our official minder, thought it was the best party hed ever been to and Yuri said that he had thought rumours of British spies were propaganda until he met Bitties (who spoke Russian like a native).

There was one of the latest visits ‘92 when Gorbachev was in power and glasnost had started — «openness». We had been speaking with our tea lady at the cancer