Michael Isaac Lerman

Michael was born on September 21,1932 in Korosten, Ukraine. He was the only son of Isaac and Ida Lerman and had two sisters, one dying in infancy. At the age of nine he boarded a cargo train with his family hours before the nazis reached his town. Other family members in Korosten were killed. Michael's grandfather and other family living in Kiev perished in Babi Yar.

Upon being bombed, the train stopped at Saratov, a desolate rural area, where Michael and his family spent two years in a dugout with no heat or water and barely any food. His grandfather died of starvation, giving his rations to the children. Thereafter, Michael's family relocated to Chelabinsk, in the Urals where Michael and his sister could finally attend school. There he lived until 1947, after which the family moved to the Moscow region. Michael was an excellent student and received the gold medal in high school. Despite his stellar academics, he was refused admission to Moscow's top universities due to Jewish quotas and general antisemitism. He began medical school in 1951 and later obtained a Ph.D. and D.Sc., finishing his dissertation in 1968 on the assembly and disassembly of ribosomes. In the USSR he worked as a laboratory head and spoke at seminars. Throughout the 1960s and 70s he published foundational work on ribosomal structure and the function of messenger RNA, working alongside some of the most talented Soviet scientists.

Like all Soviet university students, he had to partake in hard labor for the good of the regime. His specific duties were to improve grain production in Kazakhstan over several summers. There he tilled virgin soil with little agricultural technology, no electricity or running water, and an outhouse the students had to dig themselves.

In 1960 he married Svetlana Snow and had a son, Eugene. Svetlana died from cancer in 1973 and he later married Eugenia Miniovich in 1975, who would remain his wife for 50 years, predeceasing Michael by seven months. With Eugenia he had a daughter, Leah, born in 1982.

In 1980, Michael and his wife and son were granted exit visas and permitted to immigrate to the U.S. as refugees. They would be the last Jewish family allowed to leave the USSR until the regime's end. When immigrating, Michael had to leave behind his father, sister and two nieces, all of whom he thought he would never see again. They were later reunited upon the USSR's collapse in 1991. Through the refugee program, Michael and his family lived in Rome for about four months while waiting for admittance to the U.S. In Rome, Michael and his family experienced Italy's turbulent political landscape, including terrorism instigated by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigade).

In the U.S., Michael worked at the National Cancer Institute at NIH. He was the principal investigator and section chief of a lab and directed pivotal cancer research for over twenty-five years. During the 90s and aughts, his lab was successful in sequencing the entire human genome. Publishing over 200 papers in scientific journals, with a current count of over 37,000 citations, his greatest work was the 1993 discovery of the von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) gene, a breakthrough that provided the first molecular link between a rare hereditary cancer syndrome and one of the most common forms of sporadic kidney cancer. This would lead to new treatments for kidney cancer. Years later, Michael and his collaborators were nominated for the Nobel prize in medicine for this accomplishment.

Outside the lab, Michael was an ardent lover of literature, classical music and history and a great outdoorsman. While in the USSR, he traveled to its outer reaches, favorites being the Caucuses and the Kola Peninsula. At times he would go into the deep wilderness for many weeks at a time, sending one letter home to his mother saying, "I am alive." Michael was no stranger to taking risks when it came to his passions. He once took some English maps from the university library and hiked into the wilderness. He accidentally came upon a gulag and barely escaped notice by the guards, who would have taken him for a spy.

In the last forty years, Michael continued his travels to the world's greatest natural feats, including many trips to the Arctic circle, Patagonia and the Gobi Desert.

Michael loved his family dearly and was prepared to make any sacrifice for their well-being. He said he was ready to work as a janitor so long as he could immigrate from the USSR and give his children a better life. He died peacefully on September 15, 2025 in Bethesda, MD and is survived by his son, Eugene, his daughter, Leah, and four grandchildren, Ariel, Benjamin, Alexander and Emmanuel.