Zhukovskii, Petr Mikhailovich

Born on Jan. 10 (22), 1888 in Kishinev. Soviet botanist; academician of the V. I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1935). Member of the CPSU since 1940.

Zhukovskii graduated from Novorossiiskii University in Odessa in 1911. He became the director of the Botanical Garden in 1920 and a professor at the Polytechnical Institute in Tbilisi in 1923, and he was a professor at the K. A. Timiriazev Moscow Agricultural Academy from 1934 to 1952 and the director of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Horticulture from 1951 to 1960. He has been a professor at Leningrad University since 1962. While he was on an expedition to Asia Minor, Syria, and Mesopotamia from 1925 to 1927 he collected about 10,000 specimens of old indigenous cultivated plants. In 1956 and 1958 he brought seeds and tubers back to the USSR from Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Mexico as starting material for breeding. He advanced the theory of the combined evolution of host and parasite in their common habitat, the theory of megagene centers and endemic microgene centers of origin of cultivated plants, and the theory of the origin of juvenile scions (of buds of the seedling type) from secondary meristems. Zhukovskii demonstrated the importance of carotenoids in microsporogenesis in plants. He discovered and described a new wheat species, Triticum timopheei Zhuk, which is unique in its high immunity to diseases and pests and is a carrier of cytoplasmatic male sterility. It is of major importance in breeding wheats for immunity and for heterosis. Zhukovskii is a corresponding member (1955) and an honorary doctor (1967) of the German Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He has received the State Prize of the USSR (1943) and the N. I. Vavilov Prize (1967), and he has been awarded four Orders of Lenin, three other orders, and medals.