She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her

Summary

Harvard has made little comment about Ms. Petrova’s detention. A spokeswoman said this week that the university “is closely following the rapidly shifting immigration policy landscape and the implications for its international scholars and students,” and is “engaged with Ms. Petrova’s attorney on this matter.”Many in the research community there only learned about it two weeks ago, when Ms. Petrova’s co-workers started a GoFundMe appeal to help pay her legal expenses. The news sent shudders through a sprawling community of scientists who immigrated to the United States for careers in research. It comes amid deep cuts in federal funding for science that, to many, signal that a period of openness and progress may be ending.Ms. 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.“I was in paradise,” she said. “I would very much like to stay in paradise.”A ‘supernerd’Ms. Petrova had just finished her master’s degree when Konstantin Severinov, a prominent molecular biologist, recruited her for an ambitious, high-profile project in Moscow.Dr. Severinov, who leads a laboratory at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, had been asked to design a Russian genome-sequencing center, backed with $250 million in funding from Rosneft, the state-owned oil company. He was assembling a team to help build a database structure and write code.He described Ms. Petrova as a “supernerd,” the product of especially intense, competitive scientific training. Her skills, which combined computer science and biology, were “very, very marketable,” he said in an interview, in demand at genomics centers all over the world.Dr. Severinov wanted her on the team, he said. The job was interesting scientifically and “highly advantageous financially.” But it required passing a securi...