Yevgeny Sverdlov

Yevgeny Davidovich Sverdlov was born on 16 November 1938 in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (now Dnipro, Ukraine). He studied at the Faculty of Chemistry of Lomonosov Moscow State University and graduated in the early 1960s. In 1965 he defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation, the Soviet equivalent of a PhD, beginning a research career centred on the chemistry of nucleic acids and molecular genetics.

From 1965 Sverdlov worked at the Shemyakin Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences, progressing from researcher and group leader to head of laboratory. His early research focused on the organic chemistry of nucleic acids. The book Organic Chemistry of Nucleic Acids, associated with his circle of work, was translated into English under the editorship of Nobel Prize winner Lord Alexander Todd and used as a laboratory reference.

Between 1988 and 2006 he was director of the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. After stepping down he continued as a scientific counsellor to the Academy and to the institute. He taught chemistry at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in the mid-1980s, became a professor of molecular genetics at Moscow State University's biological faculty from 1993, and held a Distinguished Professorship at the university from 1999. From 1996 to 1998 he taught as a supernumerary professor of chemistry at Boston University in the United States.

He supervised more than seventy PhD-level candidates and six Doctor of Sciences theses, and served as editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Genetics, Microbiology and Virology. He sat on editorial boards including Bioorganic Chemistry and Doklady Akademii Nauk, and was associated with international genetics organisations including the European Society of Human Genetics and HUGO.

Sverdlov's scientific standing was recognised by election as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1984 and as a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997. He was an academician of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences from 1991. In 2001 he was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and to Academia Europaea.

His decorations and prizes included the USSR State Prize (1981 or 1982, according to institutional summaries), the Lenin Prize (1984), the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1988), the Order of Honour (1999), the Order For Merit to the Fatherland, fourth class (2009), and the State Prize of the Russian Federation in science and technologies for 2015, awarded at a Kremlin ceremony in 2016. Public sources used for this page do not detail his private family life.

Yevgeny Sverdlov died on 28 September 2026, according to the English Wikipedia biography updated the following day. He was 87. No cause of death has been stated in the public notices available when this page was written. His death closed a career that had shaped molecular genetics research and teaching in Russia for more than half a century.

Sverdlov helped build the institutional base of molecular genetics in the late Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia, as laboratory head, institute director and professor. Colleagues and students remember him through the many dissertations he supervised, the journals he edited, and the nucleic acid chemistry that linked organic chemistry to genetics. His election to Russian, German and European academies, and his national prizes from the USSR State Prize to the 2015 Russian State Prize, mark the public recognition of that work. He remains a reference point for the generation of Russian molecular biologists trained under his leadership at the Institute of Molecular Genetics and at Moscow State University.