Thanks to Veniamin Kaverin’s Open Book, most people from the USSR have no doubt: penicillin was invented in the Soviet Union. In reality, however, the life-saving drug reached the USSR from Britain. This happened thanks to the courage of two men: British Nobel laureate Ernst Boris Chain and Soviet chemist Chaim (Vil) Zeifman, who smuggled the precious vial across all borders—in the pocket of his jacket.
The first antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered in 1929 by the famous British scientist Alexander Fleming. Eleven years later, two other British scientists—Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain—succeeded in isolating and purifying the compound, and it was promptly put into mass production, first in Britain, then in the United States. This became a major asset for the Allied forces during World War II.
Soviet chemists, who received initial data on penicillin from foreign intelligence services, faced much greater challenges in producing their own antibiotic. In 1942, Soviet researcher Zinaida Ermolyeva—who would later inspire the heroine of The Open Book—succeeded in isolating the Penicillium crustosum strain. But resources for industrial production of penicillin became available only at the end of the war. The lab at the All-Union Institute of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industry (VNIHFI) was assigned to launch production, and a young and promising chemist, Vil Zeifman, was appointed head of the lab.
Chaim Zeifman was born on May 11, 1911, in the city of Kielce (now Poland), into a religious Jewish family. His father was a tailor, his mother a seamstress. According to Chaim, his parents lived hard-working lives and died “not even knowing how to sign their names.” There were several children in the family, but Chaim was considered the most capable, and great hopes were placed on him.
Fleeing World War I, the family moved to Central Asia in 1914. Chaim started school in Tashkent. By the age of 13, he had to start working to support his family. His working life began under a new name—Vil (an abbreviation of “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”)—a name given to him by members of the Tashkent Pioneer Organization in honor of the recently deceased leader of the world proletariat. From then until his death, he was officially known as Vil in his work and documents, but remained Chaim to family and friends.
Despite financial hardship, Chaim–Vil managed to finish school and college in Tashkent and continued his education at the renowned D. I. Mendeleev Moscow Institute of Chemical Technology (MKhTI). After graduating from “Tekhnolozhka” in 1936, he began working as a technician at the newly constructed Akrikhin pharmaceutical plant. By 1938, he had become head of the plant’s laboratory and technical department.
In 1941, Zeifman went to the front. He suffered a concussion, earned four military orders and four medals, and met victory in Austria as a major in the Third Ukrainian Front. His appointment as head of the penicillin technology lab at the All-Union Institute of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industry (VNIHFI) came while he was still in service. Chaim was ordered to return to Moscow and immediately begin his new duties.
Zeifman approached the task with enthusiasm, but after reviewing the available materials, he realized there was little that could actually be put into production. “Dirty, amorphous, in a petri dish—unsuitable for manufacturing,” he said about the Soviet version of the drug, derived from the fungal culture found by Ermolyeva. Indeed, in terms of its properties, Ermolyeva’s yellow penicillin was significantly inferior to the white penicillin developed by Chain and Florey: it caused fevers, had poor shelf life, and was far less effective pharmacologically than its American and British counterparts.
However, by early 1947, Zeifman reported the creation of a pilot-scale plant that produced penicillin using deep fermentation. This was a major breakthrough: the first Soviet penicillin factories in Moscow and Riga were built based on this technology. But the USSR was still nearly a decade behind the West.
To avoid wasting time—and lives—the then-director of the All-Union Penicillin Institute, N. M. Borodin, proposed acquiring an entire penicillin factory from the former Allies. After complex negotiations between the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Medical Industry with Anastas Mikoyan, who was then responsible for foreign trade, it was decided to purchase advanced technology from America. In August 1947, a commission headed by Borodin was sent to the West with that mission. Chaim Zeifman, as the head of the laboratory and the specialist who had already built the USSR’s first experimental plant, was included in the delegation.
In 1947–1948, Borodin’s commission unsuccessfully attempted to purchase a penicillin plant—first in the United States, then in the United Kingdom. By that time, relations between the Soviet Union and the former Allies had completely deteriorated. The U.S. imposed an embargo on the export of penicillin manufacturing equipment to Communist bloc countries. American officials were seriously concerned that the Soviets might repurpose the factory for uranium enrichment, which used similar technology.
That’s when Borodin had the idea to write directly to one of the creators of penicillin, Nobel laureate Boris Chain. While Chain couldn’t sell the USSR a factory, he did hold the patent for the technology.
Professor Chain—full name Boris Chaim—was a Jew, the son of an emigrant from Mogilev. He spoke fluent Russian and had a favorable view of the Soviet Union. Having lost his family in Nazi concentration camps, Chain valued human life more than the wishes of high-ranking officials in the British or American governments. His response came quickly: Chain immediately agreed to transfer his patent on crystalline penicillin to the USSR, along with the data he had on industrial production methods. He also offered to help train personnel in his Oxford laboratory—all for a purely symbolic fee.
On May 20, 1948, Chaim Zeifman, as the only chemical technologist in the Soviet delegation, traveled to Oxford, where Chain’s laboratory was based.
During their work together, a friendship developed between the two Jewish scientists. Before Zeifman returned to Moscow, Chain officially handed him a 100-page manual detailing the equipment and working methods used in penicillin production plants. As a personal “gift,” he also gave Zeifman a vial containing an American fungal strain—from which pure penicillin could be extracted.
The story of the vial’s handoff has been preserved in the Zeifman family. Chain understood that the Soviet Union lacked the necessary penicillin strain, meaning that even with the proper equipment, the chances of producing quality penicillin in Russia were slim. So he ordered a vial of penicillin from the United States “as if for experiments.”
“When the vial arrived,” the family recalls, “he called Vil Iosifovich over, placed a small box in the center of the round table, and said: ‘I saw nothing, I heard nothing.’ Then he turned around and walked into the next room… with a Chaplin-like gait.”
Zeifman smuggled the vial back to Russia illegally, hidden in his jacket pocket. Despite selling the patent, Chain remained untouchable in England—he was a Nobel laureate and an Oxford professor, and England was a free country. However, in 1950, the scientist was denied entry to the U.S.: CIA agents had reported to the American government that powdered penicillin had suddenly appeared in the Soviet Union, and Chain may have been suspected of supplying the strain. But he wasn’t too troubled by it.
For his Soviet friend, however, their contact came at a much higher cost. The trouble began with the defection of the commission’s head, Borodin. On September 7, the day the delegation was supposed to sail from London to Moscow, Borodin failed to show up at the ship and instead requested political asylum in England. From that moment, all responsibility for the delegation’s decisions in England fell squarely on Zeifman’s shoulders.