Alexander Goldfarb

Alexander Goldfarb was born in 1947 in Moscow

Goldfarb was born in Moscow in 1947. He studied biochemistry at Moscow State University and graduated in 1969. He then worked at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow.

He left the USSR in 1975 and earned a Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute in Israel in 1980. He did postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany. He settled in New York in 1982 and became an American citizen.

From 1982 to 1991 he was an assistant professor at Columbia University. From 1992 to 2006 he worked at the Public Health Research Institute in New York, where he led research on RNA polymerase in E. coli. He also directed a project to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis in Siberian prisons, funded by George Soros.

Abroad, he kept ties with Soviet dissidents, spoke for refuseniks and translated for Andrei Sakharov. In 1991 he persuaded Soros to give $100 million to former Soviet scientists, and from 1992 to 1995 he ran operations at Soros' International Science Foundation. Since 2001 he has headed the International Foundation for Civil Liberties, funded by Boris Berezovsky.

In 2000 he helped Alexander Litvinenko and his family reach Britain, and was barred from Britain for a year as a result. When Litvinenko was poisoned in London in 2006, Goldfarb acted as his unofficial spokesman and read his deathbed statement accusing Vladimir Putin. He has not visited Russia since 2000.