Obituary: Igor Borissovitch Raikov, 1932–1998

Igor B. Raikov, one of the greatest protozoologists of this century, died on the 27th of October 1998 after a long, incurable illness. He was born on 30.12.1932 in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. Igor's father, a professor of biology, suffered badly under political repression that was especially directed against biologists. In 1949 Igor nevertheless started to study biology at the University in St. Petersburg. He graduated in 1954 and became a postgraduate student of this University. In 1957 he switched to the Institute of Cytology of the Academy of Sciences, also in St. Petersburg, and in 1968 he received the title "Doctor of Biological Sciences" which, in the Russian system, is a higher degree than the Ph. D. of the western world. 1969 he obtained the Metchnikoff-Prize from the USSR Academy of Sciences. Twenty years later, Raikov was elected head of the "Laboratory of Cytology of Unicellular Organisms" at the Institute of Cytology, Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, a position he held until his death. In 1989 he was appointed Professor of Cell Biology.