Roman Beniaminovich Khesin-Lure

Born Mar. 24, 1922, in Moscow. Soviet biologist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1974).

In 1945, Khesin-Lur’e graduated from Moscow State University, where he had been a pupil of A. S. Serebrovskii. He worked at the university from 1945 to 1948 and at the Institute of Biological and Medical Chemistry of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR from 1949 to 1953. From 1954 to 1956 he headed the subdepartment of organic and biological chemistry at the Kaunas Medical Institute, and from 1956 to 1959 he headed a group of biochemical geneticists at the Institute of Biophysics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow. Since 1959 he has been supervisor of a section of the biology department at the I. V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow.

Khesin-Lur’e’s principal works deal with genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology. He showed the influence of the cytoplasm of the egg cell (the “maternal effect”) on the manifestation of the majority of genes of the zygote in the embryonic development of Drosophila (1945–48). Khesin-Lur’e was the first in the USSR to investigate the fractionation of the structural components of cells, the localization of enzymes, and the synthesis of proteins (1949–61). He also studied the mechanism of enzyme synthesis of RNA and the regulation of gene activity in bacteriophages and animals. He advanced a theory of the regulatory mechanism of gene activity based on changes in the structure of RNA-polymerase.