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14 Facts About Boris Balinsky

1.

Borys Ivanovych Balinsky was a Ukrainian-South African biologist, embryologist, entomologist.

2.

Boris Balinsky was born 23 September 1905, in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire.

3.

Boris Balinsky's father, Ivan Balinsky, was a historian, lawyer and teacher at Galen College.

4.

Boris Balinsky's aunt, Valentyna Radzymovska, was a biologist who was involved in Ukrainian independence movements.

5.

Boris Balinsky's parents loved English literature and spoke Ukrainian, Russian and English at home.

6.

Boris Balinsky was a student of the Soviet zoologist and evolutionary biologist, Ivan Schmalhausen, and one of the first people to conduct experiments inducing organogenesis in amphibian embryos.

7.

Boris Balinsky's distinguished himself by having his first scientific paper published while he was only 20 and still an undergraduate.

8.

Boris Balinsky became a full university professor at Kiev University in 1933 at age 28 and the deputy director of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences two years later in 1935.

9.

Boris Balinsky became a recognised expert in fish and amphibian development.

10.

Boris Balinsky's wife was arrested October 7,1937 for engaging in counter-revolutionary propaganda and was sentenced to ten years in a gulag.

11.

Therefore Boris Balinsky lost his post as professor and as deputy director of the Institute.

12.

Boris Balinsky briefly worked in Scotland in Conrad Hal Waddington's laboratory on mice embryology.

13.

Boris Balinsky worked in entomology and described new species of Plecoptera, Odonata and moths from the family Pyralidae, mainly from Caucasus and South Africa.

14.

Boris Balinsky died at home in Johannesburg on 1 September 1997, aged 91.