Smirnov, Aleksandr Ivanovich

Born Mar. 13 (25), 1888, in Moscow; died there Mar. 9, 1945. Soviet plant physiologist and biochemist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1943).

Smirnov graduated from Moscow University in 1911 and from the Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1914. (The latter is now the K. A. Timiriazev Moscow Agricultural Academy.) In 1924 he received a professorship at the Kuban’ Agricultural Institute in Krasnodar and was named a department chairman at the Central Institute of the Tobacco Industry in the same city. Smirnov subsequently worked in Moscow at the Institute of Fertilizers, Insecticides, and Fungicides from 1934 and at the Institute of Biochemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1936.

Smirnov wrote numerous works on the synthesis of amides by plants, nitrogen and hydrocarbon exchange, the role of ash elements in plant nutrition (in connection with fermentation processes), and the biochemical bases of drying grain. He proposed a method for controlling tobacco fermentation given a certain temperature and amount of humidity. Smirnov’s research was the basis for the introduction of effective methods of tobacco curing and of off-seasonal tobacco fermentation.