Vishniac, Roman

Vishniac, Roman (vĭsh`nēăk), 1897–1990, Russian-American biologist, photographer, linguist, art historian, and philosopher, b. Pavlosk, near St. Petersburg. Vishniac took degrees in medicine, philosophy, art history, and biology. He fled in 1920 to Berlin, where he conducted research in endocrinology and worked as a photojournalist. From 1933 to 1939 he produced a photographic record of Jewish communities in Central and Western Europe. A part of this unique humanitarian document was published in 1947 under the title Polish Jews. In the mid-1930s he was imprisoned 11 times and forced to do hard labor in two concentration camps. He escaped and emigrated to the United States in 1940. At Yeshiva Univ. he was appointed research associate (1957) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and became professor of biological education there in 1961. A pioneer in time-lapse cinematography and light-interruption photography as well as the color photomicroscopy of living organisms, Vishniac became, in 1960, project director and filmmaker for the Living Biology film series sponsored by the National Science Foundation. His chief biological researches were in the field of marine microbiology, the physiology of ciliates, and circulation systems in unicellular plants. He proposed the hypothesis that the first living organisms were multicellular structures that emerged many times in many places by different biochemical pathways (polyphyletic origin). A volume of his color microphotographs of proteins, vitamins, and hormones, Building Blocks of Life, was published in 1971. Widely read and fluent in most modern and ancient European and Asian languages, Vishniac was a specialist in East Asian art and philosophy. He taught in several fields at many universities, including the City Univ. of New York, Pratt Institute, and Case Western Reserve Univ.