Andrei Sakharov

From 1986 to 2011, Zafra chaired the American Chemical Society's Subcommittee on Scientific Freedom and Human Rights. She worked on human rights cases in the former Soviet Union, Russia, China, Guatemala, Cuba, Peru, South Africa, Iran, and many more. She met with dissidents in many of these countries. After meeting Andrei Sakharov in 1989 and taking his advice, she took a crash course in Russian to facilitate her work with dissidents in the former Soviet Union. At great risk to her safety, she succeeded in preventing executions, releasing prisoners of conscience from jail, and bringing dissidents to freedom. From 1987 until now, she has served as a Vice Chair for Chemistry on the Board of the Committee of Concerned Scientists (CCS), where she continues to be very active in human rights cases.

Aleksandr Nikitin

Professor Zafra Lerman appears on C-SPAN to introduce Aleksandr Nikitin on a discussion on Radioactive Contamination in the Former Soviet Union. Aleksandr Nikitin was a Russian dissident that was arrested by the FSB after publishing an article about spilling nuclear waste from submarines into the sea. He appears in this picture giving a lecture to 1,000 members of the American Chemical Society (ACS) at the ACS National Meeting in Washington, DC in 2000, before the charges against him were dropped. Nikitin spoke about the problem of nuclear safety in Russia and potential threats from radiation from various sources. Among the topics he addressed were threats from spent submarine reactors, environmental threats posed by poorly maintained facilities, and government secrecy and inaction. He also commented on a recent accident in which a Russian submarine had become incapacitated in the Barents Sea. Recorded August 24, 2000