Departures of note

Olga Lepeshinskaya, born Protopopova in Perm, Russia, in 1871, was a revolutionary who later became a biologist. She trained as a feldsher in St. Petersburg and joined a Marxist group in 1894, marrying fellow revolutionary Panteleimon Lepeshinsky. Exiled to Siberia in 1897, they became loyal supporters of Lenin, and in Geneva they ran a cafe that served as a meeting point for Bolsheviks. After the 1905 revolution failed, she gave up political activity and completed her medical training in Moscow in 1915.

In the 1920s, Lepeshinskaya began making extraordinary scientific claims. She discredited the work of her supervisor, Alexander Gurwitsch, and asserted that cells could propagate by disintegrating into granules that generated new cells, that inorganic crystals could be converted into cells with nucleic acids, and that life could arise spontaneously from non-living matter. She also claimed that soda baths fostered rejuvenation, which led to a temporary shortage of baking soda. Her claims, which she supported with fabricated proofs, were propagated as official dogma in the Soviet Union, and in 1950 she gave a keynote speech at a special symposium on 'Live Matter and Cell Development' that was celebrated as revolutionary. She received the Stalin Prize that year, and her ideas became mandatory instruction in biology.

In reality, Lepeshinskaya's methods involved filming the death and decomposition of cells and projecting the films in reverse to support her claims. Her husband, Panteleimon, dismissed her work, telling a visitor, 'Don’t you listen to her. She’s totally ignorant about science and everything she’s been saying is a lot of rubbish.' Despite this, her claims were never officially renounced; they simply faded away. She worked into her eighties and died in Moscow in 1963 from pneumonia, and her ashes were buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery.