NATASHA RAIKHEL
Director, Institute for Integrative Genome Biology Former Director, Center for Plant Cell Biology Distinguished Professor of Plant Cell Biology
Ernst and Helen Leibacher Endowed Chair University of California, Riverside © KRISTIANNA KOCH RIDDLEIn 1977, Natasha Raikhel, then an assistant research scientist working at the Institute of Cytology in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), made a trip to Baku in Azerbaijan to collect ciliate samples from the Caspian Sea. On the return flight, the plane crashed in a potato field between Moscow and Leningrad, killing some on board. Raikhel, her husband, and their three-year-old son survived, but her perspective on life changed drastically. “It was a large plane, and it was horrific. I needed to get a statement for my institute of how the equipment, microscopes, and everything I had collected there went missing, and the airline first told me to go back to Baku, because as far as they were concerned, there was no airplane crash,” says Raikhel.
After much prodding by Raikhel, the airline provided her with a statement that the airplane had had to make an “unexpected landing.” “After that, I decided that I could not live in the Soviet Union anymore. This was the last drop,” says Raikhel, now director of the Institute for Integrative Genome Biology and a distinguished professor in the Center for Plant Cell Biology at the University of California, Riverside. She and her then husband, Alexander Raikhel, at the time a scientist at the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, asked to be fired from their positions—a way to protect their coworkers who could be punished by the regime for being associated with émigrés, as emigration was frowned upon in the Soviet state—and ...
