Nikolai Turbin

Turbin, Nikolai Vasil’evich

 

Born Nov. 20 (Dec. 3), 1912, in the village of Tuma, in what is now Klepiki Raion, Ria-zan’ Oblast. Soviet geneticist and breeder. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR (1953) and the V. I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1967). Member of the CPSU since 1950.

Turbin graduated from Voronezh Agricultural Institute in 1935. Between 1945 and 1953 he was a professor at Leningrad State University; during this period, from 1948 to 1952, he was also director of the Biological Institute of Leningrad State University. From 1953 to 1965 he was director of the Institute of Biology of the Academy of Sciences of the Byelorussian SSR, and from 1965 to 1971, director of the Academy’s Institute of Genetics and Cytology. In 1968 he became academician-secretary of the department of plant growing and breeding of the V. I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. In 1974 he was appointed director of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Applied Molecular Biology and Genetics of the V. I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Turbin’s main research is concerned with the principles of plant breeding, for example, polyploidy of the sugar beet, the heterosis phenomenon, and the genetics of cytoplastic male sterility. He demonstrated the possibility of automixis in wheat in interspecific crossings (1968) and investigated the genetics of al-kaloidness in lupines.

Turbin was president of the All-Union Society of Geneticists and Selectionists from 1972 to 1976. He has been awarded two orders and a medal.

WORKS

Eksperimental’naiapoliploidiia i geterozis u sakharnoi svekly. Minsk, 1972. (With V. E. Bormotov.)
Diallel’nyi analiz v selektsii rastenii. Minsk, 1974. (With L. V. Khotyleva and L. A. Tarutina.)

REFERENCES

“Krupnyi sovetskii uchenyi.” Selektsiia isemenovodstvo, 1973, no. 1.
Khotyleva, L. V. “K 60-letiiu akademika N. V. Turbina.” Vestnik sel’skokhoziaistvennoi nauki, 1973, no. 1.