Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson was one of the most prominent Soviet geneticists, a former student of Nikolai Koltsov, who was among the scientists who had to struggle against the persecution of geneticists in the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. He studied mutations and human genetics and was among the first to estimate the rate of spontaneous mutations in human genes in 1932 although this was published first by J.B.S. Haldane.
