завоеватель - The Conqueror
Leonid began his formal scientific journey employing electric fields to interrogate the fundamental properties of membranes - electrochemistry. The culmination of his PhD thesis contributed much to the understanding of how electrical fields impress a controllable level of tension on membrane bilayers such that their bilayer nature breaks down and forms new shapes (1). This opened the collective understanding for how electricity could be employed to form pores, vesicles, and a variety of non-bilayer structures in biological membranes and provided vital clues as to how Leonid could wrangle biological membranes. This led to early technical approaches for the electroporation of living cells to introduce DNA templates. While we worked together, Leonid use to recall tales of getting requests for helping colleagues electroporate their cells to perform some experiment - something of a near science fiction at the time. In response, Leonya make a sort of scientific “house call” with a large, hand-build electrical apparatus assembled as a sort of backpack. While the image is likely one of my own creating and not firmly established in reality - I imagine him skipping through Soviet Moscow with something borrowed from Frankenstein’s laboratory.
After a birth into membrane biophysics, Leonid moved to expand a new frontier - Biomembrane Fusion. Cells possess many membranes which they use to package a great deal of things, but how precisely do they contort their membranes so that which is packed away can be opened and shared in the expanse of an organelle, a fusion partner even? While at the Frumkin Institute of Electrochemistry - U.S.S.R. - Leonya persued answers to the mechanisms underpinning membrane fusions of many sorts with a talented graduate student, Grigorii Melikyan. Decades later, Grigorii would help administer a course at Emory University - U.S.A. - that I was the teaching assistant for. When I asked Grigorii if he were me, who would he study virus-host interactions with? Grigorii replied with something to the effect of, “If I were you, I would not study virus-host interactions, but if you are committed to this sort of punishment, you should contact Leonid”. But we digress. Leonya and Grigorii started chats - over tea I am sure - with a young, brilliant physicist - Michael Kozlov - to hypothesize and test how these membranes should dance as they come together into their fusions (2). And so, the birth of a hemifusion dream began - a fundamental of all membrane fusions. Of course, if the geometries predicted in these earlier works were to hold for eukaryotic life, they should be able to tame these fusions with lipids of the wrong shape - lysolipids even. Together with a dear friend - Evgenia - Leonid tamed these biological fusions, from sea urchins to insect cells (3). Three decades later, the pair would again use these lysolipids to help me establish our La La Land Chronicles.
Some years later, Leonya enlisted a new friend, Benny Podbilewicz, to carry these lovely ideas about membrane fusions into the mystical process of making one cell from many. It was here that we all now look back into the strange, lovely history of eukaryotic fusogens - machines that turn many cells into one great community (4). If you wish to follow the physics of it all, the shapes of the lipids as they dance in celebration of the absolution of the thin veil that divides two cells from one another, then please hear the tale from the two friends that rent this boundary in our understanding (5).
Try as they might: neither dictators nor boarders hindered him, neither bitterness nor hate impeded him, neither poverty nor riches distracted him. Leonid Chernomordik is one of the kindest, funniest, most thoughtful persons I have had the privaledge of meeting in this life. He overcame all that would stop him with neither fist or flame, but he conquered them all with a joke and the resolve of a bear - The Conqueror.
