Valery Legasov

Valery Alekseyevich Legasov was an inorganic chemist, professor at Moscow State University, first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, and a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. Born 1 September 1936, he spent his career in the upper ranks of Soviet science until April 1986 thrust him into the center of catastrophe: containing the Chernobyl disaster. That August he presented the investigation's findings to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, detailing the actions and circumstances that caused the explosion while leaving out certain design flaws in the RBMK reactor itself. His health deteriorated from radiation exposure, and his efforts to reform Soviet academic chemistry met only resistance. On 27 April 1988, exactly two years after the disaster began, he died by suicide.