Nikolai Kiselev (1928 – 2016)
Nikolai Kiselev was a long-term supporter and collaborator of the LMB. He first visited the Lab in 1966, as a Postdoctoral Fellow, to work with Aaron Klug and David DeRosier on the analysis of electron micrographs by optical filtering. He made many subsequent visits, especially during the 1990s, when he brought virus samples and worked with Tony Crowther on the three-dimensional structure of hepatitis B virus and of infectious bursal disease virus.
Nikolai Andreevich Kiselev was born on 5th October 1928 in Moscow. He was a student at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and after graduating worked at the Baikov Institute of Metallurgy and then the Laboratory of Measuring Instruments at the USSR Academy of Sciences. He then became interested in the study of biological objects by electron microscopy and moved to the Institute of Crystallography, where he was involved in the development of experimental methods. With A. S. Spirin, he began to explore the structural basis of protein biosynthesis on ribosomes. With L. L. Kiselev he worked on transfer RNA. Nikolai was also interested in a range of other biological structures, including enzymes and viruses. In later years, he worked on a wide range of solid-state physics structures, including silicon tips and carbon nanotubes.
For his work, Nikolai received the Lenin Prize in 1986 and was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Microscopical Society (UK) in 1993. He was elected a Corresponding Member of the USSR/Russian Academy of Sciences in 1979. Nikolai died on 17th September 2016.
Further references:
Nikolaĭ Andreevich Kiselev (on the occasion of his 80th birthday). Crystallography Reports, 2008, Vol. 53, No. 6, pp. 1091–1092.
Professor Nikolai Kiselev HonFRMS. Royal Microscopical Society, 2016.