[1] He has combined a scientific career as a microbiologist with political and public activities focused on civil liberties and human rights in Russia, in the course of which he has been associated with Andrei Sakharov, George Soros, Boris Berezovsky, and Alexander Litvinenko.

[4] From 1992 to 2006 he was a faculty member at the Public Health Research Institute in New York where he led a U.S. government-funded study "Structure and Function of RNA Polymerase in E. coli" with a total budget of $7 million.

[5] He also directed the project "Treating Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Siberian Prisons" funded by a $13 million grant from philanthropist George Soros.

[8][9] From 1984 to 1986 Soviet authorities refused Goldfarb's father permission to leave the USSR after their unsuccessful attempt to make him collaborate and entrap American journalist Nicholas Daniloff.

[15] In 1991 Goldfarb persuaded Soros to donate $100 million to help former Soviet scientists survive the hardships of the economic shock therapy adopted by the Boris Yeltsin government.

[16] From 1992 to 1995, Goldfarb was Director of Operations at Soros' International Science Foundation, which helped sustain tens of thousands of scientists and scholars in the former Soviet Union during the harshest three years of economic reform.

[22] Since 2001 Goldfarb has been Executive Director of the New York-based International Foundation for Civil Liberties, founded and financed by the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

[28] He later testified in a libel suit, in which Berezovsky successfully contested the claim by Russian state television station RTR (now Russia 1) that he had murdered Litvinenko.

[29][30] Following the attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, UK on March 4, 2018, Russian TV network coverage of the incident named Goldfarb as the murderer of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

[33] On March 4, 2020, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni denied a motion to dismiss the case, ruling that New York had personal jurisdiction over the matter because Channel One Russia maintains a Manhattan studio where correspondent Zhanna Agalakova interviewed Goldfarb in relation to the allegedly defamatory story.