Vitalii Iosifovich Goldanskii, general director of the Joint Institute of Chemical Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), died of heart failure in Moscow on 14 January 2001.
Goldanskii was born on 18 June 1923, in Vitebsk (now Belarus). His parents were schoolteachers. Later, the family moved to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where, in 1939, Goldanskii entered Leningrad State University to study chemistry. His learning, however, was interrupted by World War II. Goldanskii was wounded while participating in the defense of Leningrad. He survived the hunger and cold of the winter blockade, and was evacuated to Kazan in 1942.
He continued his education in chemistry at Kazan State University and simultaneously worked as a lab technician in one of the institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (now the RAS). Goldanskii moved to Moscow in 1943 to continue his education in chemistry at Moscow State University. He graduated from there in 1944. He was a postdoc at the Institute of Chemical Physics, which was headed by the Nobel Prize winner Nikolai Semenov, who became Goldanskii’s teacher and friend. (Later they would become relatives when Goldanskii married Semenov’s daughter Lyudmila.) In 1947, Goldanskii defended his thesis for his PhD. His dissertation was entitled “Ion Catalysis in Polymolecular Layers.” Because the Institute of Chemical Physics, like many other scientific centers of the former Soviet Union, participated in the Soviet atomic weapons program during the 1940s, Goldanskii started to work in the field of nuclear physics.
During the period 1944-50, Goldanskii worked in Dubna with a group of other physicists at the synchrocyclotron (later the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research). They studied the process of high-energy neutron absorption and multiplication, which led to the discovery of multiple secondary neutron production during bombardment of heavy-element targets. This discovery showed that it was possible to obtain plutonium from uranium-238 by the so-called electronuclear breeding previously predicted by Semenov and Ernest Lawrence. It was on these results that Goldanskii based his DSc dissertation entitled “The Absorption and Multiplication of High-Energy Neutrons,” which he defended in 1954.
From 1952 to 1961, Goldanskii worked at the Lebedev Physical Institute, where he conducted a series of investigations into the fission of heavy nuclei. During that period, he was also very much interested in the physics of elementary particles. He subsequently produced a number of publications devoted to π0-meson photoproduction on hydrogen, scattering of gamma rays on protons, detection of the electromagnetic polarization of hadrons, and determination of the proton and π+-meson polarizability constants. Also widely known are Goldanskii’s papers on the nuclei of elements far from the β-stability region, the so-called neutron-rich and neutron-deficient isotopes. Goldanskii, together with Yakob Zeldovich, predicted the existence of a number of such isotopes, including superheavy helium-8. He also predicted a new, fourth type of radioactive decay—two-nucleon radioactivity—which was experimentally observed in the mid-1980s.
In 1961, Goldanskii returned to the Institute of Chemical Physics to organize the laboratory of nuclear and radiation chemistry (now the department of matter structure). However, chemistry, as it was understood by Goldanskii, was essentially a new science based on physical concepts and the development and implementation of nuclear physics methods. Goldanskii’s investigations during that period included the well-known study of the chemical properties of positronium, which has a lifetime of 10−7 to 10−9 seconds. Goldanskii, with his colleagues, wrote a new chapter in the science of radiochemistry: They created the radiochemistry of positronium.
Goldanskii was among the first to understand the broad possibilities of applying the Mössbauer effect to chemical problems. The first publication (1961) on the Mössbauer effect in polymers containing tin was followed by a series of papers that established a new direction of research—chemical Mössbauer spectroscopy or gamma-resonance spectroscopy (GRS). To date, the GRS method, as well as positron spectroscopy, is among the arsenal of methods widely used for studying the structure of materials. GRS significantly contributed to solving a number of tasks, not only in chemistry but in molecular biology. GRS provided clear evidence that intramolecular mobility is a very important factor in the functioning of biopolymers.
The change in the chemical state of elements as a result of their nuclear transformations led to the development of a new field in nuclear chemistry: hot atoms chemistry. Results gained during many years of research created the impression that everything possible in this field had already been done and the problem had been exhausted. However, Goldanskii and his coworkers managed to find a new and unexpected aspect. Investigations of how the cross sections of chemical reactions involving hot hydrogen atoms depend on particles’ kinetic energies led to an original approach to the study of the spatial structure of biopolymers, called the tritium planigraphy method. This technique is now widely used to study the structures of proteins and more complicated objects such as ribosomes, viruses, and whole cells.
After Semenov died in 1986, Goldanskii became the director of the Institute of Chemical Physics and subsequently created the N. N. Semenov Joint Institute of Chemical Physics in 1991. This new organization united all scientific institutes that were part of the Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics. Until his last day, Goldanskii was the general director and scientific leader of this institute.
For many years Goldanskii was a professor of nuclear physics at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He also was an excellent popularizer of science; he wrote a series of books and articles in popular journals and cooperated for many years with the Znanie (Knowledge) scientific society. In 1967, he created the journal High-Energy Chemistry, and he was editor-in-chief of the journal Chemical Physics Reports from 1987 to 2001.
Goldanskii’s diverse scientific activity brought him recognition among physicists, chemists, and biologists. Numerous prizes and medals recognized Goldanskii’s work. He won the Lenin (1980) and Russian Federation state (2000) prizes, administered by the government, and the Karpinsky Foundation Award (1983) from the Hamburg Foundation, located in Germany. Goldanskii was a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US. He understood well the possible consequences of a nuclear war, and actively participated in the Pugwash Movement, heading the Russian committee of this organization.
Goldanskii, who shared the political and social ideals of his friend Mikhail Gorbachev, entered politics. He was elected a deputy for the first meeting of People’s Deputies of the USSR (“Gorbachev’s Meeting”) and was a member of the Russian parliament until the USSR collapsed. In television broadcasts and the print media, he frequently called for freedom and democracy.
An excellent scientist, research organizer, teacher, and public politician, Goldanskii was by no means devoid of simple human joy. He was fond of classical and modern music, including jazz, and possessed a large record collection. He liked theater, cinema, and the arts. He was a talented author himself; in particular, many of his splendid aphorisms were published in the famous Literaturnaya Gazeta (Newspaper of Literature).
Handsomely rewarding Goldanskii with talents, Nature was not so generous with his health. He suffered heart disorders, which probably were a consequence of the war years. Even his health challenges he approached with humor: A conventional greeting of “You look well” was always answered with “I’ve no complaints about my looks.” A bright and hearty man, Goldanskii will remain in the memories of his friends, colleagues, and everyone who had the luck of meeting and working with him. With the death of this academician, Russian and world science has suffered a heavy loss.
