By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Jailed Researcher from Harvard Medical School

Many will have seen the pictures of a young woman who, screaming in panic, was arrested in an open street on the order of President Trump. She is currently detained at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.

She is shy and prone to nervous laughter. She cannot work because her laptop was confiscated, and she is under constant observation by prison guards.

She is jailed in a barracks-style detention center with around 90 immigrant women, mostly undocumented workers from Central and South America, sharing five toilets and following orders shouted by guards.

Trying to stay focused, she passes the time reading books about evolution and cell development.

For nearly eight weeks, Kseniia Petrova has been a captive to the hard-line immigration policies of the Trump administration. A graduate of a renowned Russian physics and technology institute, Petrova was recruited to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. She was part of a team investigating how cells can rejuvenate themselves to fend off the damage of aging.

Below is a picture of Kseniia Petrova from before her arrest, when she was still able to travel to Greece.

For her part, Ms. Petrova is seeing the United States from a new and unsettling vantage point. “I feel like something is happening generally in America,” she said in a recent interview over a video link. “Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”

 

The threat of another political repression

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has twice refused her lawyer’s petition for parole, contending that she is a flight risk and a threat to U.S. security. Petrova sometimes mentally rehearses what she would do if she were deported to Russia. She cannot say for sure when or if she would be arrested, she said, but the threat of political repression would always be present.

“This is the problem of this kind of autocratic regime — the people who stay there are kind of hostages,” she said. “That is the fear of being there. You don’t know what will happen. You don’t know if they will come for you or they won’t.”

Petrova's Empty Desk at Harvard

 

“Any problem I have with data, she has a solution,” a colleague said.

Petrova is not giving up on her work. As she awaits her hearing, she is studying meiosis, a type of cell division that allows egg and sperm cells to reset epigenetic marks, pointing the way to possible strategies to stop aging. All she can think of is getting back to her laboratory.

 

Her Parents are engineers

She was raised by two engineers, her mother a specialist in radio communications and her father a computer programmer, said Vladimir Mazin, a close family friend. He described Petrova as a “passionate scientist” who, on vacation in the countryside, carried her laptop with her to breakfast and dinner so she could continue training neural networks, a type of machine learning.

“Kseniia is one of those people who are truly interested in obtaining new knowledge, in finding out something that hasn’t been known before,” he said. “That’s what she is interested in. Everything else is secondary.”

On Feb. 24, 2022, when Mr. Putin sent columns of Russian tanks across the border into Ukraine, she joined protests that surged through Moscow’s streets. On March 2, she was arrested, charged with an administrative violation, fined about $200 and released.

It was clear that things were changing quickly, Petrova said. The handful of news sources she relied on for objective information “closed immediately,” she said. Ms. Petrova feared the border would close as well. She left the country two days later and finally landed at Harvard.

She said that after this, it became “really obvious” that if she wanted to be a scientist, she had to leave: “I changed my decision from ‘I will never leave Russia’ to ‘I am leaving Russia immediately.’”

Many of her classmates left at the same time. Some found lucrative jobs writing code for banks or private companies. Petrova had an offer from a lab in Britain. But she was looking for something particular, “the kind of science,” as she put it, “that I would call beautiful.”

Leon Peshkin, a principal research scientist in Harvard’s department of systems biology, had been looking to hire someone for a year.

The Kirschner Lab, where Dr. Peshkin works, is investigating the earliest stages of cell division. These changes are easy to observe in the eggs of the Xenopus frog, which are large and hardy. To lure Marc W. Kirschner to Harvard, the university constructed a vast aquarium where females bob in circulating water, known internally as the “frog palace.”

Dr. Peshkin’s team is interested in sperm and egg cells and how they repair damage as an embryo develops. They needed someone equally fluent in machine learning and cell biology, Dr. Peshkin explained in a post on Kaggle, an online community for data scientists. Ms. Petrova reached out.

When she arrived in Boston in May 2023, Dr. Peshkin was shocked to discover that she had not brought a suitcase; she had carried a backpack. It became clear, he said, that she was “extremely ascetic,” entirely wrapped up in her research.

“I thought the Russia of my childhood was gone, the Russia of this crazy, dedicated, ascetic scientist is gone,” he said. Over the months that followed, Dr. Peshkin watched her focus intensely for many hours; he saw what she could pull off in a few days of coding. “She is probably the strongest I’ve seen,” he said. “I have been at Harvard for 20 years.”

Ms. Petrova found ways to speed up everyone’s work. In a dark, enclosed room with a laser-based Raman microscope, William Trim, a postdoctoral fellow, spent his days examining the migration of lipids through tissue.

Up to two hours each day. “You don’t need to do that,” he said Ms. Petrova told him. She wrote him a script that did the job in seconds. “Any problem I have with data, she has a solution,” Dr. Trim said. They became close friends, and he eventually offered her a room in his apartment.

“All she did was science,” he said. “She would be coming home at 1 a.m. sometimes, because she just spent all day — 14, 15 hours — tweaking the flow rates of five tubes that all coalesce into one place to get this cell into a droplet.”

He painstakingly noted his findings by hand, a task that could take up to two hours each day. “You don’t need to do that,” he said Ms. Petrova told him. She wrote him a script that did the job in seconds. “Any problem I have with data, she has a solution,” Dr. Trim said.

She would also make time for work. Dr. Peshkin collaborates with a laboratory in Paris, where one of the scientists had figured out how to slice superfine sections of a frog embryo.

“All she did was science,” he said. “She would be coming home at 1 a.m. sometimes, because she just spent all day, 14, 15 hours, tweaking the flow rates of five tubes that all coalesce into one place to get this cell into a droplet.”

Petrova has spent the last month in a dormitory lined with rows of bunk beds. It is cold, and at night, the women sometimes shiver under thin blankets. Once a day, they are allowed an hour outside. Breakfast comes at different times, sometimes as early as 3:30 a.m. The hardest thing, she said, is the constant noise. The facility’s psychiatrist gave her earplugs to help her sleep.

Her colleagues are distracted and anxious; work in the laboratory has stalled. When Dr. Peshkin made the rounds of Harvard laboratories, asking colleagues to send letters of support for her to ICE, many of them confessed that they were afraid to put their names on paper.

 

Something has happened to the fabric of society

“Something has happened to the fabric of society,” he said. “Something is happening.”

Worry about her case has also radiated across networks of Russian émigrés and scientists.

“She is an indicator that the world is becoming almost evil and dangerous for people who are homeless and mean no harm to anyone,” said Dr. Severinov, the biologist who recruited Ms. Petrova in Russia. “It is an irony that this is becoming so on both sides of the pond.”

Marina Sakharov-Liberman, the granddaughter of the Soviet physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, has been following the case from her home in London. She said it was “extraordinary” that Harvard had not more publicly protested Ms. Petrova’s detention and demanded her release.

“That is something that I would expect in Russia,” she said. “Everyone would be afraid. If someone ‘disappeared,’ the institutions would be silent. Very few people would raise their voices and risk their positions.”

But Petrova worries that, when this is all over, she will no longer be able to work at the same level. “Even if I am released, I will feel much less safe,” she said. “Of course it will affect my efficiency. I will be very afraid. What if I get rearrested?”

 

 

For updates click hompage here