Dr. Vadim J. Birstein

Dr. Vadim J. Birstein, a Russian-American who arrived in the United States in 1991, is a historian and molecular geneticist and is recognized as one of the world's greatest authorities on the endangered sturgeon. Born in Moscow and educated at Moscow State University, he received his Doctor of Science in 1987. Until the end of 1998 he was a Senior Research Scientist at the Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of over 150 scientific papers and 3 scientific books as well as one history book.

Since coming to America he has been a Visiting Scientist at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York where he has collaborated with Dr. Rob DeSalle on a long-term sturgeon phylogeny project. In conjunction with this work, Drs. Birstein and DeSalle elaborated a method of caviar identification via DNA analysis in 1995 which was patented in the United States and Europe. In the early 1990s he was an Adjunct Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

His work on sturgeons also led him to become the Chairman of the Sturgeon Specialist Group of IUCN (World Conservation Union). While Chairman, Dr. Birstein worked closely with TRAFFIC Europe, the German Ministry for the Environment, the World Bank, the WWF and CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) legal staff to list all sturgeon species on the CITES Appendixes and promote legislation to ban the importation of the caviar of endangered sturgeon species into the United States. In addition, Dr. Birstein was the chief editor of the proceedings of the 1994 International Conference on Sturgeon Biodiversity and Conservation (a special issue of the Environmental Biology of Fishes, 1997), which he organized and co-chaired. He was also First Editor of Sturgeon Biodiversity and Conservation published in 1997 by Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

In addition to his scientific activities, Dr. Birstein is a historian and long-time human rights activist. In the 1970s-80s, he was an individual Amnesty International member in Moscow and since 1989 has been a researcher for the Russian human rights group Memorial (Moscow), created by Academician Andrei Sakharov and the well-known Russian human rights activist, Sergei Kovalev. In 1990, as a Memorial member, he participated in a visit of Russian and Polish historians to the Katyn forest, where in 1940 the NKVD executed thousands of Polish officers.

He is an expert on the subject of foreign prisoners in the Gulag, the fate of the Swedish Diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and Soviet doctors' experimentation on humans. In 1990-91, he was a member of the International Commission on Raoul Wallenberg and participated in the Commission's study of prisoner cards in Vladimir Prison and materials at the then secret Special, now Military Archive in Moscow. He has published three articles about his research on Raoul Wallenberg in the Russian press.

In 1991, he was a Visiting Scholar at the W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union. In 2001, he published his first history book, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science (Westview Press). In December 2004, a paperback version of this book was published by Basic Books. He has given seminars on this book at Princeton, Harvard, and Washington (St. Louis) Universities and appeared in the documentary Poisons-Discover Magazine produced in 1997 by Powderhouse Productions, Inc. (Somerville, MA).

Currently, Dr. Birstein is working on a series of books on the history of SMERSH (Soviet military counterintelligence during WWII, 1943-46), the Soviet State Security Ministry (MGB; 1946-53), Academician Vasilii Parin's story (the first victim of the Cold War in the Soviet Union), and the story of Raoul Wallenberg in Moscow prisons in 1945-47. All these books are based on published and unpublished archival documents declassified during last 10 years and available only in Russian.

To download a copy of Dr. Birstein's CV in Acrobat format, please click here.