Iurii Filipchenko

Born Feb. 1 (13), 1882, in the village of Zlyn’, in what is now Bolkhov Raion, Orel Oblast; died May 19, 1930, in Leningrad. Soviet biologist and geneticist.

In 1905, Filipchenko graduated from St. Petersburg University, where he was asked to remain to prepare for a teaching position. He defended his master’s dissertation in 1912 and his doctoral dissertation in 1917. Beginning in 1913, he gave a series of lectures on genetics at the university, the first such course in Russia. In 1919, Filipchenko became a professor of the subdepartment of genetics and experimental zoology at the university, which he had organized. He founded a genetics laboratory at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, which was reorganized as the Institute of Genetics in 1933.

Filipchenko’s principal works were on human heredity, including eugenics and medical genetics, on genetics of farm animals (horses, cattle, sheep, and goats) and of plants (including Triticum), and on problems of evolution. He was the author of the first Soviet textbooks on genetics, variability, experimental zoology, and evolution. He developed the wheat variety Petergofka.