Anna El'skaya was born in Donetsk, in Ukraine. She obtained her undergraduate and professional training in the Donetsk Medical Institute, graduating with an MD as a general practitioner (physician) in 1963. While she was still a medical student, Anna began to carry out scientific research in the Department of Biochemistry at the institute, and following graduation she worked for a further two years in the Department of Surgery, as head of a biochemical laboratory. She then moved to Kiev and in 1968 she obtained her PhD in Biology at the Institute of Biochemistry of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU). When the Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics of NASU was set up in 1973, Anna became a senior researcher in the Department of Nucleic Acids, and in 1975 she was appointed head of the Department of Translational Mechanisms. She has worked abroad for short periods: with Murray Deutscher at the University of Connecticut, in Farmington; with Knud Nierhaus at the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Genetics, Berlin; and with Isao Karube at Tokyo University. Anna is currently the Director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics of NASU, head of the Biology Council of the Ukrainian State Foundation for fundamental research, and Editor-in-Chief of the Ukrainian journal Biopolymers and Cell.
Anna's current basic research interests are regulation of protein biosynthesis in higher eukaryotes, in particular tRNA and the mammalian elongation factor eEF1A. She is also involved in applied research aimed at the creation of bio- and chemo-sensors for medicine, ecology and the food industry.
In the interview that follows, Fiona Watt, Editor-in-Chief of JCS, asks Anna about her experiences as a woman in science.
FMW:How has your research career impacted on your personal life and vice versa?
AE: I was never keen to become a physician. However, there was no university in my native town and my parents could not financially support me in any other city, because they were far from being wealthy people. As soon as I entered the Donetsk Medical Institute I began working in the Department of Biochemistry, as part of a so-called student scientific circle. I have never forgotten my first experiment. It was to investigate biochemical changes in the blood induced by stress. My girlfriend and I took a cat and a dog and organized stressful conditions by teasing and exciting them. I was then supposed to take a sample of blood from the dog's foreleg vein! However, the cat scratched my friend and I was badly bitten by the dog, so we both ended up having a course of anti-rabies injections. Undeterred, we refined our experimental approach, completed the research, and even presented the results at the student scientific conference.
My future, rather successful, career would not have been possible without the support of my mother, who helped take care of my two children when I was between the ages of 25 and 30. In general, I think that the career of women in science depends very much on the personalities of their relatives, especially their husbands. Both of my husbands have played a crucial role in my scientific life. My divorce from the first one encouraged me to leave the rather provincial town of Donetsk and apply for a postgraduate course in one of the best biological institutes in Ukraine. Marriage to my second husband, who is a scientist, has given me a very understanding friend, without whose support I would not be able to work so much and so hard.
The first two years of my PhD in Kiev were just awful, mainly because all the results I obtained contradicted my starting theoretical premise and seemed even to defy common sense. Then I read an article by Professor Sueoka, who was then at Princeton University, NJ, which made me look at the data from a completely different point of view. Working day and night, I managed to finish and defend my thesis before the end of my postgraduate course. Moreover, I had the excitement of being among those scientists who had discovered the so-called functional adaptation of tRNA, an efficient mechanism of regulating gene expression at the translation level. Two years later I was happy to thank Professor Sueoka personally when we met at an international congress in Riga, Latvia.
Two other foreign scientists helped me a lot in my scientific life, Professor Deutscher in Farmington and Professor Nierhaus at the Max-Planck Institute of Molecular Genetics in Berlin. I learned a great deal from spending time in their labs and they provided valuable resources for my lab in Kiev. Professor Nierhaus has been my good friend and collaborator for many years. Just now two young women from my department are working in Professor Nierhaus's lab on a joint project investigating the elongation cycle in higher eukaryotes and the relationship between tRNA-binding sites on the 80S ribosome.
I would like to emphasize how precious international help was to Ukrainian scientists during all the years of economic disaster when we were part of the USSR and when we first became an independent country. Without it, we would not have survived, and we would not be able to integrate into the European scientific community now. Fifteen years of collaboration with German, English, Japanese and particularly French scientists (from Ecole Centrale de Lyon) has helped my lab to become one of the leading research groups in the field of electrochemical sensor systems.
Believe me, please, when I say that, in this country, to be the director of an institute with a staff of 430 people, ranging from internationally recognised scientists to complete beginners, is a very heavy burden. If it were not for the love and concern of my dear family, I would not even feel like a human being. My daughter Raisa is a specialist in Roman languages, my son Alex Ladokhin is a professor at the Kansas Medical Center, my grandsons Paul and Sergiy are university students in informatics, and my lovely 8-year-old granddaughter Anna dreams of becoming a dancer. Anna lives in the USA and when she comes to Kiev my husband and I are the happiest people in the world.
FMW:What changes for women in science have you observed during the course of your career?
AE: In the biological sciences the majority of researchers in the Ukraine are women. However, the positions of authority are occupied mainly by men. This male dominance is true for other scientific fields, sometimes even more so. Indeed, in society in general, the participation of Ukrainian women at high level in official bodies, including the parliament and government, is extremely low. I have not seen much improvement in this situation during the course of my career, although I was very lucky to have a boss who supported me throughout my scientific life and was proud of my successes, however small. He was delighted when I was elected to the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine as a full member in 1988. It is sad that the only new trend I have noticed is that capable and ambitious women scientists usually delay marriage or having children, or both.
FMW:Do you feel that being a woman is an inherent advantage/disadvantage for a career is science? Why?
AE: I feel that the most important thing is not gender but human abilities, character, determination and, maybe, some luck. However, there are some specific difficulties that women face. For example, usually it is rather difficult to combine a scientific career with normal human life – to be a caring mother and wife as well as a high-level scientist. Sometimes you have to sacrifice your research for your family, and vice versa, which is very painful and depressing. Besides, it seems that nowadays you need to take risks and even be aggressive to achieve success in science and indeed other careers. Women, at least most of them, are less aggressive and less self-confident than men. At the same time I think that the scrupulousness and sense of responsibility inherent in many women are very important in scientific life.
FMW:What are your remaining career ambitions?
AE: My dream is to create at our institute a centre of excellence in the area of Genomics, Gene and Cell Biotechnologies: GENOME. The decoding of the human genome and development of stem cell technologies have established a powerful basis for new directions in medicine, in particular, gene diagnostics and gene and cell therapy. Unfortunately, there is no research centre in Ukraine that is properly equipped to develop modern research in these areas. In our application to the Ukrainian Government for funding we have written the following: “Creation of GENOME will ensure the development and application of new methodical approaches for solving some fundamental problems of modern biology; accelerate the development and application of novel biotechnologies for the needs of modern medicine, agriculture, ecological monitoring, etc; provide unique scientific equipment for collective use by the scientists of different Ukrainian institutes and universities for research in the fields of genomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, and gene and cell biotechnologies; grant educational activity at high international level according to the intentions of Ukraine to integrate into the European scientific community.”
I would be happy if our government were wise enough to understand the urgent necessity of creating the centre, which would be modelled on the type of centres of excellence that are found in western Europe. I would be happy if my young scientific `heirs' could work in conditions that would permit them to realize all their tremendous potential, regardless of whether they are men or women.
