Zilber, Lev Aleksandrovich
ZILBER, LEV ALEKSANDROVICH
ZILBER, LEV ALEKSANDROVICH (1894–1966). Russian microbiologist, virologist, and immunologist. He was the brother of B.A. *Kaverin. Zilber graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1915 and Moscow University in 1919. He began to work at the Institute of Microbiology of the People's Kommisariat of Health in 1921.
Due to the fact that he was an honest and principled researcher, Zilber more than once suffered repression: between 1937 and 1939 and from 1940 to 1944, he was incarcerated in Soviet "corrective labor" camps. From 1939 to 1940 he headed the department of virology, and in 1945 the department of immunology and malignant growths at the Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the U.S.S.R. From 1945 he was a member of this academy. His scientific fields of interest encompassed the variability of microorganisms and immunology. In 1937 he described a previously unknown viral disease: Far Eastern tick elephantiasis. In 1945 he began elaborating a viral theory of the origin of cancer. He was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1946 and a joint State Prize posthumously in 1967, for the discovery of the pathogenesis of the Raus chicken sarcoma in other kinds of animals.
[The Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia in Russian, Jerusalem]