Pomerantsev, Boris Ivanovich

B.I. Pomerantsev was born in St. Petersburg on March 3, 1903. Later the family moved to Saratov where he studied in a local high school. After his father died in 1917, he had to work and tried his hand at many jobs: agricultural worker, docker and sailor on the Volga River, and even a musician in a military orchestra. He left school in 1920 and entered the hydrotechnical faculty of the State University of Saratov. However, the faculty was soon closed and only in 1924 could he continue his education in the Institute of Applied Zoology and Phytopathology in Leningrad. There he began work on pyroplasmosis of cattle and ixodid ticks as vectors of the disease in Novgorod Region. He graduated from the Institute in 1929 as an entomologist specializing in ticks. From 1930 through 1933 he worked in the All-Union Institute of Plant Protection in the Department of Stock-Raising Pests, and in 1934 he was invited to the Department of Parasitology of the Zoological Institute of the USSR Academy of...