Andriy Slyusarchuk
[10] Slyusarchuk was employed by the V. Chornovol Lviv State Institute of Modern Technology and Management,[4] the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture,[5] the P.L.
Shupyk National Medical Academy of Postgraduate Education,[7] and the A. P. Romodanov Institute of Neurosurgery,[5] he lectured at the Lviv Polytechnic,[6][16] and worked at the government of Ukraine as an adviser to Oleksandr Turchynov.
[28] Slyusarchuk claimed he obtained a Doctor of Science degree, which allowed him to go into medical practice, performing neurosurgery, appearing on radio and television, granting interviews and publicly demonstrating his mnemonic skills.
[9] He was interviewed by major newspapers, such as Trud: As a teacher, as a psychiatrist, I can say pleno jure (with full right): today it is mostly the dependent children who attend universities in this country.
[25] From 1980 to 1987 (second to eighth grade) Slyusarchuk lived and studied at an institutional school for young orphans in the town of Hryshkivtsi in Berdychiv Raion, receiving a certificate for the completion of his education there.
According to the complaint, Slyusarchuk diagnosed a woman with a terminal illness, promised to cure her with expensive drugs, took $665 from her and disappeared; it indicated that he had a diploma from the M. I. Pirogov Vinnytsia Medical Institute.
[40] When the academic administration requested verification from the Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Education of Russia for Slyusarchuk's credentials, it was told that there was no record of him as a professor or a Doctor of Science.
[45][46][47] On 26 December, the Mirror Weekly published an interview with Slyusarchuk where he claimed that he had been offered the position of head of the institute and hoped to implement his plans.
[36] In 2010 Slyusarchuk practiced disaster medicine, performed surgery throughout Ukraine and conducted behavioral experiments on rats in his one-room apartment with his assistant Chervoniy, using a neuromagnetic stimulator and other devices.
[49] On 25 May 2011, Dmytro Pavlychko, Levko Lukyanenko, Yuri Palchukovsky and Volodymyr Pylypchuk appealed to President Viktor Yanukovych to establish the Institute of the Brain and tp invite Slyusarchuk to head it because he was threatening to leave Ukraine for intellectual reasons.
[80] According to a birth certificate shown by him to journalists, Slyusarchuk was born in the village of Tuğ in the Hadrut Rayon of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.
His parents, medical professionals (his mother a pediatrician and his father a cardiac surgeon), died in a car accident the year he graduated from secondary school.
[84][85] A December 22 press release from the President of Ukraine reported that Yushchenko and Slyusarchuk had discussed an Institute of Brain Studies to prevent and treat neurological disorders, focusing on social problems such as drug and alcohol abuse.
[86][87][88][89] Slyusarchuk claimed that his memorization skills were based on mental associations between figures, images, words, numbers (mnemonics) and a photographic memory of everything on which he concentrates.
[14] A February 2010 article in the newspaper Novaya reported that Slyusarchuk's student, Alexander Chervonyi, claimed that he could reproduce many of his teacher's memory performances including the recitation of randomly-selected sequences from the first five million decimal places of pi.
[100] On a TV show, he hypnotized students of the L'viv University of Modern Technology (Львівський державний інститут новітніх технологій та управління ім.
[100] His televised demonstration of chess-position memory (memorizing all pieces on 80 boards) was criticized by invited chess master Grigoriy Timoshenko, who said that he was 99.9-percent sure that the performance was fake,[101] and a New York Times article called Slyusarchuk "an illusionist".
[107][108] During the investigation, senior officials of the Ministry of Education and Science, Youth and Sport of Ukraine (including department heads and the vice-minister) had told the press that Slyusarchuk's documents and scientific titles were valid according to Ukrainian law and protocol.
[77] The examination found Slyusarchuk partially sane from a legal standpoint; he had a "mixed personality disorder with a predominance of dissocial, hysterical and narcissistic elements".
[78] The examination results were questioned by Ukrainian psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman: "If Doctor Pi begins to testify, a lot of compromising materials on the powerful of the world can appear.
[79] Ministry of Internal Affairs public-affairs department head Volodymyr Polishchuk said, "Independent examination [was] conducted to check Slyusarchuk's mental health and his possible psychic and hypnotic abilities".
[114] In his final testimony at the trial Slyusarchuk said, "The logic of such 'expert opinions' is simple: to diminish the defendant's attempts to adduce evidence in his defense, to force court and public not to believe a word said by him, he is declared out of his mind.
The agent was aware of a program in which orphans with unusual abilities were recruited throughout the Soviet Union; many died as a result of neurological experiments, but Slyusarchuk survived.
In 2005, he reportedly accidentally damaged his original diploma from the Russian National Research Medical University; a month later he received a duplicate, and denied any forgery.
In 2003 Slyusarchuk reportedly met with Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents, agreeing in writing not to disclose the results of his scientific works and advising the Ukrainian government.
[28] At a 16 December 2011 press conference, Minister of Education and Science Dmytro Tabachnyk said that his ministry's Russian counterpart admitted that it had mistakenly issued Slyusarchuk a duplicate diploma.
"[10] In the article, Ukrainian psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman expressed the opinion that Slyusarchuk skillfully took advantage of poor security; if he had chosen a lower-profile specialty, he might have succeeded.
[121] His research was nominated by the academic administration of Lviv Polytechnic for the State Prize,[31][32] and the issue was debated in Kyiv by a commission of Ukrainian scientists.
[53] The decree awarding the State Prize is unrevoked,[122] describing his credentials as a professor of Information Systems and Networks at Lviv Polytechnic and a Doctor of Sciences in medicine.
[100] In 2012 the HTH channel broadcast a documentary by Oleg Vasilevsky, Nezbagnenna Afera Doktora π (The Incredible Fraud of Doctor Pi).
