Zilber was born on March 15 [O.S. March 27][1] 1894 in the family of the kapellmeister Abel Zilber and his wife, née Khana Girshevna (Anna Grigorievna) Desson, pianist and owner of music stores. Place of birth – the village of Medved, Medved volost, Novgorod Governorate. His sister Leya (married Elena Aleksandrovna Tynyanova, 1892–1944) is the wife of the writer and literary critic Yury Tynyanov, a classmate of Lev Zilber. His younger brothers: military doctor David Zilber (1897–1967), composer and conductor Alexander Ruchiov (1899–1970) and writer Veniamin Kaverin (1902–1989).
Career
In 1912, Zilber graduated from the Pskov provincial gymnasium with a silver medal and entered the natural department of the Faculty of physics and mathematics of St. Petersburg Imperial University. In 1915 he transferred to the medical faculty of Moscow University, having received permission to attend classes at the natural department at the same time and graduated from it in 1919.
Having left in 1919 as a volunteer for the front he served in the Red Army in various positions from a doctor to the head of the medical unit. He was taken prisoner by the whites, but successfully escaped. Since 1921, he worked at the Institute of microbiology of the People's Commissariat for Health in Moscow.[2]
In 1929, he accepted an offer to take the position of director of the Azerbaijan Institute of microbiology and head of the department of microbiology at the Medical University in Baku. He led the suppression of an outbreak of plague in the villages of Bulutan and Hadrut in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1930.[5] Upon his return to Baku, he was introduced to the Order of the Red Banner, but was soon arrested on charges of sabotage to infect the population of Azerbaijan with plague. He was released after 4 months (possibly, at the request of Maxim Gorky, who was approached by the younger brother of Lev Zilber, writer Veniamin Kaverin, perhaps due to the efforts of his ex-wife Zinaida Yermolyeva).[6] Upon his release, Zilber worked in Moscow heading the department of microbiology at the Central Institute for the Improvement of Doctors and head of the microbiological department of the State Scientific and Control Institute of the People's Commissariat for Health of the RSFSR named after Lev Tarasevich.
In 1932, he led the elimination of an outbreak of smallpox in Kazakhstan[4] and in 1935 he also married with Valeria Petrovna Kiseleva.
In 1937, he led the Far Eastern expedition of the People's Commissariat for Health of the USSR to study an unknown infectious disease of the central nervous system. During the work of the expedition the nature of the disease – tick-borne encephalitis was clarified and methods of dealing with it were proposed.[6]
Immediately upon his return, he was arrested on denunciations of an attempt to infect Moscow with encephalitis and concealment of the fact that encephalitis was brought into the USSR by Japanese saboteurs. In June 1939 he was released. Zilber participated in the struggle for his release. His brother Kaverin, Ermolyeva, colleagues on the Far Eastern expedition A. K. Shubladze, Mikhail Chumakov, V. D. Solovyov and many others participated in the struggle for his release.[4][7]
In 1940 Zilber was arrested for the third time. While imprisoned, he served part of his term in camps on the Pechora river, where in the conditions of the tundra he received a yeast preparation against pellagra from the reindeer moss and saved the lives of hundreds of prisoners who died from complete vitamin deficiency. He received a copyright certificate for the invention, the certificate was recorded in the name of the "NKVD".[4] He refused repeated offers to work on bacteriological weapons. Remembering Zilber's ability to get alcohol from reindeer moss, the authorities sent him to a chemical "sharashka", where he began carcinoma research.[8] For tobacco the prisoners caught mice and rats for Zilber for experiments. In the course of research, he formulated a new concept of the origin of cancerous tumors.
In the summer of 1945, he found and took his family to the USSR – his wife, wife's sister and two sons who survived in German work camps, where they spent 3.5 years. In the same year, he was elected an academician of the newly created USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, appointed scientific director of the Institute of virology of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and headed the Department of virology and tumor immunology of the Institute of epidemiology, microbiology and infectious diseases of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, where he worked all subsequent years.
He was occupied with basing and elaborating a viral theory of the origin of cancer. Zilber received the State Prize of the USSR in 1946; in 1967 he was posthumously awarded the State Prize of the USSR for discovering the pathogenicity of the virus of Rous sarcoma of fowl for other classes of animals (cycle of works, 1957–66). He was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor and medals.[2]
In 1958 he participated in the 7th International Cancer Congress in London.[4][11] In 1959–1965 he participates in the WHO working group on cancer, in the work of international symposiums and conferences on the problems on oncology in Berlin, Libice nad Cidlinou, London, Bratislava, Warsaw, Turin, Prague.
In 1965 he was an organizer and participant of the International Symposium on Cancer Immunology in Sukhumi.
Zilber's children subsequently became famous scientists: Lev Lvovich Kiselev (1936–2008) – molecular biologist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Fedor Lvovich Kiselev (1940–2016) – molecular biologist, specialist in carcinogenesis, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences.
Brother of Lev Zilber – David Alexandrovich (Abelevich) Zilber (1897–1967), hygienist and head of the department of general and military hygiene, dean of the medical and preventive faculty of the Perm State Medical Institute,[12] author of the book Pharmacy Hygiene (1962), a textbook for pharmaceutical faculties "Hygiene" (1970).
The wife of his brother Alexander (Ekaterina Ivanovna Zilber, 1904–1963) in her second marriage was married to the playwright Evgeny Schwartz.[13]
He is also the author of more than 300 scientific articles published in domestic and foreign journals, as well as popular science articles and essays.[4] Member of the associations of oncologists of US, France and Belgium, member of the Royal Society of Medicine, honorary member of the New York Academy of Sciences, organizer and chairman of the committee on virology and cancer immunology at the Union for International Cancer Control, WHO expert in immunology and virology.
Kiselev, L. and Levina E. S. Lev Aleksandrovich Zilber (1894–1966): life in science. Science, 2004. — 698 p. (Scientific and biographical literature). ISBN 5-02-032751-4.
