Alex Benjamin Novikoff ((1913-02-28)28 February 1913 – (1987-01-09)9 January 1987) was a Russian–born American biologist who is recognized for his pioneering works in the discoveries of cell organelles.
A victim of American Cold War antagonism to communism that he supported, he is also recognized as a public figure of the mid-20th century at the height of McCarthyism in America.
He was the first to describe lysosome using electron microscopy; his collaborator Christian de Duve received Nobel Prize for the discovery.
His hobbies included skinning and dissecting animal corpses, and he once boiled a dead cat to observe its skeleton.
His initial research focused on experimental embryology, and soon his interest shifted to cell biology under the influence of Arthur Pollister.
In 1955 he joined the faculty of pathology at the newly established Albert Einstein College of Medicine, becoming full professor in 1958.
In 1955, now confident that the membranous particles were cell organelles, de Duve gave a hypothetical name "lysosomes" to reflect their digestive properties.
[9] That same year, after visiting de Duve's laboratory, using his own histochemical protocol Novikoff successfully produced the first real images (electron micrographs) of the new organelle.
"It is largely due to Novikoff's bold and imaginative use of morphological techniques," de Duve praised him, "that lysosomes have come to be recognized in a broader biological context."
de Duve went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 for the discovery of lysosomes, but Novikoff's contributions were forgotten.
[13] It was at the Ciba Foundation Symposium on Lysosomes held in London on 12–14 February 1963, that he explained this phenomenon in which organelles such as endoplasmic reticulum, ribosomes, mitochondria and other cell debris were degraded by autolysis in the cytolysomes.
Then the following speaker de Duve correctly identified that these organelles were lysosomes, and named them autophagic vacuoles, and he introduced the term "autophagy" for the process of such intracellular digestion.
[18][19] In 1961 with Sidney Goldfischer, Novikoff developed a staining method for the Golgi body using the enzyme nucleosidediphosphatase, by which they described the enzymatic property of the organelle for the first time.
He helped writing and disseminating party newsletters in the Brooklyn campus, which was a centre of communist activity in the area.
[2] In 1953 while he was a permanent faculty at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, at the time McCarthyism was at its height, anti-communist activists once again targeted him for his 1930s involvement in the Communist Party.
On 23 April 1953, he refused to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security at Washington, D.C., on anything about his past political life, especially on identification of his communist colleagues at Brooklyn College.
A week later, on 5 September, the fifteen-member board of trustees confirmed his firing from the university, with a single dissenting vote from Robert Joyce.
[28][29][30] His case was kept open for twenty years, and having found no substantiated evidence, the FBI closed his file in 1974, which by then contained 822 pages.