Sergej in the Urn

Directed by Boris Hars-Tschachotin. Liquid Blues Production: 2009. DVD release August 2012.

A distracting weakness for women and politics meant that, unlike his friends Albert Einstein and Ivan Pavlov, the Russian microbiologist Sergej Stepanowitsch Tschachotin (1883–1973) never achieved scientific immortality. But in his time he was a renowned cancer researcher and innovative cell biologist — and his extraordinary life makes a riveting film.

Married five times and a frequent political exile, Sergej Tschachotin lived a life that reflected the tumult of twentieth-century Europe. So German film-maker Boris Hars-Tschachotin, one of Sergej's roughly 27 great-grandchildren, had a family story ripe for documentary. Researching tales told by his grandfather Wenja Tschachotin, one of Sergej's eight sons, Boris made an unexpected discovery. Hidden in the Paris home of his great-uncle Eugen Tschachotin sat the urn containing Sergej's ashes, which had been collecting dust for 30 years. The film Sergej in the Urn, out this year in Germany, describes Boris's efforts to bring the family together to fulfil Sergej's last wish: to be buried in Corsica.

Sergej Tschachotin, pictured in 1907, used his ultraviolet scalpel to study sea-urchin parthenogenesis. Credit: LIQUID BLUES PRODUCTION

Irresolvable hostilities among Sergej's four remaining sons halted that plan. But the documentary is all the more absorbing for that. It reconstructs the scientist's life and times from filial memories, archival footage of Nazi Germany and revolutionary Russia, and an unpublished autobiography that Eugen smuggled out of the Soviet Union with the urn, letters and other documents.

Sergej's dual life as idealist–activist and scientist began early. As a student in Moscow, he was deported in 1902 for participating in protests against the Tsarist regime. He moved to Germany, where he continued his studies in Munich, Berlin and finally Heidelberg.

His first academic post was in Messina, Italy, where he was caught in the 1908 earthquake that killed more than 70,000 people. Miraculously, he and his first wife and son were pulled from the rubble alive, although Sergej's leg was crushed. In his autobiography he claims that during the subsequent surgery he thought up the 'ultraviolet scalpel' — a beam of ultraviolet light that can make precise cuts through biological tissue — for which he became moderately famous.

Back in Heidelberg, he made a prototype. He used it to manipulate individual cells under the microscope, which helped him to contribute to debates on subjects such as the response of cancer cells to treatments. He also used the scalpel to prod unfertilized sea-urchin eggs into undergoing parthenogenesis.

On the strength of these successes, and to his enormous pride, Sergej was invited to join Pavlov's lab in St Petersburg in 1913. But unable to resist the siren call of politics, he began to educate soldiers in science and technology matters relevant to the war against Germany. Pavlov asked him to do this outside the lab, and Sergej drifted away from research.

Sergej in the Urn shows a man whose family life was incompatible with science and revolution.

For the next 15 years, politics dominated his life, and his fiery reputation lost him several academic jobs. He briefly joined the White Army, and fled Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. In 1922, Sergej became reconciled with the Soviet government, and found work at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, where he befriended Einstein. But a few years later, when Stalin rose to power, Sergej gave up on the Soviets and went back to science.

His next post was in Genoa, Italy. It was supported by a grant from the Vatican, which apparently thought that his work on parthenogenesis might provide insight into the conception of Jesus.

In 1930, Einstein recommended Sergej for a post at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. But Sergej was thrown out of the institute in 1933 for co-founding an anti-Nazi movement called the Iron Front. He believed in fighting propaganda on its own emotive terms, and designed a strong logo to rival the swastika and a raised-fist salute to match the raised hand.

Exiled in Paris, he explicated his propaganda theory, which drew on Pavlov's theory of conditioned reflex, in his still-admired 1939 book The Rape of the Masses. In 1941, with the Nazis occupying the city, Sergej was interned for some months — but pressure from German scientists secured his release.

After the war, Sergej campaigned against the atomic bomb, founding the Science Liberation Movement in Paris in 1946. He returned to his homeland in 1958, after Stalin's death. Sergej was by then into his seventies, and his letters describe his disappointment with the revolution. He was forbidden to travel, and ended his days working at the Moscow Institute of Developmental Biology. (However, he managed to find enough energy to marry for a fifth time.)

Sergej in the Urn shows a man whose family life was incompatible with science and revolution. This is poignantly clear when Eugen plaintively asks, “He always wanted to save the world, but what becomes of us?” Towards the end of the film, Eugen's treatment of his great-nephew shows the psychological toll of Sergej's behaviour, but to say more would be a spoiler.

Sergej in the Urn won best German-language documentary at the Munich Documentary Film Festival in 2010, and went on general release in Germany on 23 February 2012. The DVD (in German, with English subtitles) will be available through www.sergej-in-der-urne.de from August.