Sobol, Samuil

Born Aug. 12 (24), 1893, in Odessa; died Dec. 1, 1960, in Moscow. Soviet biological historian. Corresponding member of the International Academy of the History of Science (1956).

Sobol’ graduated from Novorossiia University (now the University of Odessa) in 1920. From 1922 to 1933 he worked in publishing houses, and from 1929 to 1931 at the Communist Academy. Subsequently, he worked for the division of biological sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, where in 1938 he organized a study room on the history of microscopy, which later became the department of the history of microscopy of the Institute of the History of the Natural Sciences. From 1946, Sobol’ worked at the Institute of the History of the Natural Sciences and Technology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, serving as director of the section on the history of biological sciences until 1955.

From 1932, Sobol’ participated in the preparation of the nine-volume Collected Works of Charles Darwin, for which he wrote many introductory articles and commentaries. He also wrote a series of works on the struggle to disseminate Darwinism, particularly in Russia, and on the activities of such Russian evolutionists as N. A. Severtsov, A. P. Bogdanov, and D. I. Ivanovskii.

In 1950, Sobol’ received the State Prize of the USSR for the monograph The History of the Microscope and Microscopic Research in Russia During the XVIII Century.