Nikolai Konstantinovich Koltsov was one of the creators of the modern subject of genetics. He was born to a reasonably well-to-do family and achieved academic distinctions throughout his career. Typical of his insistence on the importance of political issues was the fact that Koltsov, in protest to the Tsarist government's reaction to the Russian revolution of 1905, did not apply to receive his doctorate from the University of Moscow, despite having accomplished the work in a variety of fields at home in Russia and abroad. Koltsov did not receive his doctorate until 1935.

With the Russian revolution of 1917, Koltsov found himself in a position to influence the development of Soviet science. The Institute of Experimental Biology that he established was the first Russian biological research institute. Although he had started off with an interest in comparative anatomy, he turned from that subject to the study of the cell to which...