Dr. Vadim J. Birstein, a Russian-American who arrived in the United States in 1991, is a historian and molecular geneticist. Born in Moscow and educated at Moscow State University, he received his Doctor of Science in 1987. Until the end of 1998 he was a Senior Research Scientist at the Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of over 150 scientific papers and three scientific books as well as the well-received history The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science (Westview Press, 2001), which has been re-published in paperback twice by Basic Books.While still the Soviet Union, Dr. Birstein became a human rights activist and an expert on the subject of foreign prisoners in the Gulag, the fate of the Swedish Diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and Soviet doctors' experimentation on humans. In 1990-91, he was a member of the International Commission on Raoul Wallenberg and participated in the Commission's study of prisoner cards in Vladimir Prison and materials at the secret Special Archive in Moscow. In 1991, he was a Visiting Scholar at the W. Averell Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union. He has given seminars at Princeton, Harvard, and Washington (St. Louis) Universities and appeared in the documentary Poisons-Discover Magazine produced in 1997 by Powderhouse Productions, Inc. (Somerville, MA). For the last ten years, Dr. Birstein has focused on researching and writing his ground-breaking history of SMERSH, which will be continued in a second volume focusing on the final years of SMERSH's chief Viktor Abakumov, when he was head of the forerunner of the infamous KGB, the MGB.You can learn more about Dr. Birstein on his website, http://vadimbirstein.com.