Timofeeff-Ressovsky moved to Germany in 1925 to work at the Institute for Brain Research in Berlin and became famous in the 1930s for his works on radiation and population genetics. He stayed and worked in Germany throughout the Nazi period, and in 1945, after the Red Army occupied Berlin, he was arrested by Soviet security. He was able to continue scientific research in one of the gulag's many prison laboratories, or sharashki, located in Sungul, in the Ural region. Timofeev-Ressovsky studied technologies of radioactive decontamination Abstracts201 of waters and soils and founded a new branch of scientific research, currently known as radioecology. Later, he worked in another site of the Soviet atomic project, Obninsk near Moscow. In 1968 he developed earlier ideas of V.I. Vernadsky into a comprehensive research program on «Biosphere and humanity,» which introduced a new perspective on the nature of life from the point of view of open systems thermodynamics.