—Elena Yurievna, we are now walking between the historic manor[1], which is the main hospital building, and the annex, which is now a atherothrombosis lab. How being  a scientist and a practicing cardiologist matches in your life? Those are actually two different life stories.
— I've balanced science and medicine from the very beginning of my career, because I’ve been interested in both. I remember, one time in 1987, our professor’s relative was admitted to our department with a heart attack. He kept getting life-threatening arrhythmias that required resuscitation. There was no improvement, so then the patient's son-in-law, a distinguished mathematician at Harvard, asked Professor Bernard Lown, a famous cardiologist and inventor of the defibrillator, to assist with the treatment remotely. The professor called the hospital every day. I discussed our patient's treatment with him over a regular land-line phone. At some point, the patient's blood work showed zero level of thrombocytes. Being familiar with the subject of blood clotting from my research, I decided to do a few tests to get a sense of the absence of thrombocytes in the patient's blood. To that end, I took my own blood, extracted a thrombocyte suspension, and then added a drop of the patient's plasma: all of my thrombocytes clumped together immediately. Then I knew the patient's plasma contained something that caused the thrombocytes to clump together.

— Were there any drugs available at the time that could’ve helped?
— No, there weren't any. Dr. Sergei Grachev (now a professor in our hospital) and I decided to give the patient a full plasma transfusion. The patient was unconscious almost the whole time. Following the plasma transfusion, the arrhythmias stopped, the patient opened his eyes and asked: "What has been going on at Politburo?" We all figured he suffered encephalopathy, but then his wife came and told us he was very much into politics and it was par for the course for him to talk like that. He lived another 15 years after that. After that incident, Lown wrote me a letter, inviting me to visit his clinic.

— Now when fundamental science walks hand in hand with hands-on clinical practice, it’s called translational medicine, but this does not happen very often even today. It looks like your hospital has practiced translational medicine for quite some time now?
— Basically, this is what we’ve been doing for nearly 40 years now. The thing is, blood coagulability is my lifelong research interest. I began while still a Moscow State University of Medicine and Dentistry student, and I've continued ever since. When I first started, I did platelet adhesiveness research in collaboration with a brilliant scientist, my father's student Leonid Margolis. He is now a professor at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Our debut collaboration was a paper on thrombi formation, based on the assumption that endothelial cells can change their adhesiveness to thrombocytes. Right then evidence surfaced indicating that something like that occurs in atherosclerosis. We demonstrated that platelet adhesiveness depends on the condition of the lipid films they attach to: platelets adhere well to solid-crystalline films and very poorly to liquid-crystalline films. I remember asking this American doctor who worked in my father's lab, "Hey Bob, what are some good journals to send a high-quality article to? What journals are considered reputable?" He said, "Cell is good, students love it". Back then we had no idea exactly how amazing that journal was, so when our article got accepted straight away we thought nothing of it. Following that success story, I figured it would be possible for me to pursue both my interests, science and clinical practice,  simultaneously.
Right about that time I met Liya Grinshpun, a great scientist and physician. She taught me that it's every doctor's duty to fight for the patient even when formally, there is no hope. For insante even as a student, I already knew it was possible to surgically remove a metastasis obstructing an organ and then continue with chemotherapy. This was nowhere near becoming a common practice in the 80s.
Liya and I brainstormed my career options and agreed that blood clotting was the thing for me. There were a few respectable researchers in the field in Moscow at the time, but the real luminary was based in Barnaul, his name was Zinovy Barkagan. He was a wonderful human being and a great scientist who set up a world-class blood coagulation lab in Barnaul, Altai Republic. His interest in blood coagulation inspired Barkagan to study herpetology (the study of reptiles) and he became an expert in snakes: snake poison is used a lot in blood clot research, and reagents were very expensive to buy at the moment. Patients with complex health problems came to his clinic from all over the world. Around that time, he authored a few pioneering papers on the anticoagulant factor, Antithrombin III, and was the first in Russia to profile families with hereditary deficiency of this protein.

— Did you travel to Altai?
— Liya Grinshpun arranged a meeting for us in Moscow. I told Barkagan I wanted to study Antithrombin III in heart attack patients. Zinovy said it wasn't worth it,  not interesting at all. He suggested I focus on platelets instead.
I must say, it was by no means obvious to me at the time that I should do platelets. Barkagan came up with a genius guess about 40 years ago, and time has proved him right. He suggested that different hemostasis mechanisms[1] played the leading role in blood vessels of different sizes. Plasma hemostasis is dominant in larger vessels, while platelet hemostasis is more prevalent in smaller vessels, such as coronary arteries.
At that time, no one realized that atrial fibrillation produces thrombi in the cardiac cavities, which may lead to ischemic strokes, or that these thrombi can be treated with anticoagulants that inhibit plasma hemostasis. Or that thrombi occurring in the coronary arteries, which cause heart attacks, can be effectively treated with drugs that prevent platelet aggregation, like aspirin. Interestingly, it was not common practice at the time to prescribe aspirin for people who have had a heart attack. The earliest papers had just been released suggesting that aspirin may be effective in heart attack recovery.

— How did your platelet research begin?
— I started off by studying morphological changes in platelets in heart attack patients. Soon I noticed that platelets take a "hedgehog" shape during a heart attack, while regularly they look like flat disks. I was almost done with my dissertation when suddenly the differences in shape started to vanish. Eventually everything smoothed out and I could no longer see any difference. It took me six months to figure out what was wrong. It turned out that the problem was in the blood test-tubes. I used tall tubes for blood when I first started. Before hitting the fixator, the platelets would collide with the walls, and that made them change shape. Once I started using shorter tubes, the platelets would no longer change. That’s how I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of every detail.
Professor Barkagan and I used our findings to develop a test to elicit unusual platelet activity. I've been fortunate enough to work with people of genius my whole life.

— Looks like you'd started your atherothrombosis research long before the MSUMD laboratory based in the hospital. What kind of research did your lab start with?
— We made the assumption that herpesviruses, particularly cytomegalovirus, may play a prominent part in atherosclerosis. Our research was the first to demonstrate that the presence of cytomegaloviruses correlates with lymphocyte activation in atherosclerotic patches. When a heart attack happens, these viruses may enter the bloodstream and disrupt endothelial cells.

— What is the laboratory currently working on? What's the hot topic at the moment?
— We are pursuing multiple branches of research. Our latest focus is changes in the lipid metabolism caused by inflammation. While doing COVID-19 research, we noticed certain similarities between lung damage caused by COVID-19, bacterial pneumonias, and even inflammation in atherosclerotic patches.

— COVID-19 urged many different scientific fields forward. What were you working on during the pandemic?
— At the onset of the pandemic, we published a pioneering study demonstrating that the severity of the disease directly correlates with the initial viral load: the higher the initial virus count in the nasopharynx, the worse the prognosis. Together with Margolis' lab at NIH, we developed a unique three-dimensional lung cell model in vitro, which we believe will equip us to test a wide range of anti-inflammatory drugs, including anti-COVID drugs. A few years back, we developed a similar three-dimensional in-vitro model of an atherosclerotic patch. Now we use it to test atherosclerosis drugs. The thing is, what the typical cell culture is a layer of cells of one type. It doesn’t allow study how cells interact with the other cell types that always surround them in real life. The Margolis lab's 3D model of the lymph nodes has yielded valuable results on HIV infection mechanisms.
We have recently concluded a massive, prospective study involving 6,000 patients, focusing on the cellular and antibody immune responses, measuring each factor individually. Specifically, we found that the cellular response rarely impacts anything itself. It is primarily active in patients with a diminished antibody response. This project, which was Moscow City Government’s idea, was implemented in collaboration with six federal centers.

— Your other research focuses on vesicles, which cells use to communicate with each other. According to Professor Margolis, those are "the most important thing in biology today".
— That's right. This is an incredibly fascinating, relevant, and elegant branch of research. Vesicles are these tiny bubbles that cells exude in order to communicate with each other. In essence, they are mail packages targeting a specific recipient, unlike, let’s say, emission of cytokines, which simply enter the plasma. Platelets release more vesicles than any other cell types. Vesicles often latch on to monocytes and circulate in the blood as aggregates, triggering immunothrombosis. It is yet another phenomenon we observe in COVID-19 patients. One insightful study investigates the metastasizing of tumors: it is suggested that it is vesicles that may lay the groundwork for the process. We're just beginning to delve into it.

— Elena, you became a successful scientist pretty early on in life. I know you went to Harvard in the 90s to pursue your scientific interests in a country where science is organized better than it is in most other places. Why didn't you emigrate?
— It would have been only natural for me to emigrate, and it probably would have been the best choice in the given circumstances. To stay was a very sentimental thing to do.

— Is there anything that hasn't worked out in your life?
— When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist. One time I approached my father and asked him, kind of matter-of-factly: "You know so many people. Can you arrange for me to stay in a mental hospital during the school break?" My father never debated no anything with me. He said: "Sure, no problem, but keep in mind that I can't promise they'll discharge you by the end of the break". Back then, I thought he was right to discourage me. And so I never saw the inside of a psychiatric hospital until early in my freshman year of medical school. It was Hospital No. 15 in Moscow. We went to the ward with "violent" patients where everyone was on sedatives or tranquilizers. More than anything else, the psychiatric hospital resembled a prison. I found it too depressing. I realized I wouldn't be able to handle it, and gave up psychiatry.

— Why didn't you seek a career in the private healthcare sector?
— I never felt it was my thing. First of all, I never equated success with money. I was brought up this way. My parents were, like, if you make a million dollars, great, good for you, but that's not equal to respect. But if you get your article published in a respected journal, Nature, for instance, that is what success is! My other consideration was that it is impossible to do research in private healthcare in Russia. I could not afford to lose the academic environment that had surrounded me since childhood.

— Elena, you've mentioned your father quite often in this interview. Could you tell me about your mom, please? She was a scientist as well, a researcher at the Institute of the Scientific Research Institute of Nutrition of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences.
— Her name is Elina Naumovna and she worked as a physiologist her entire life. She performed sophisticated experiments as part of her study of digestion. She is 95 now, and very active. She and I recently published a book about my father. My mom has zero tolerance for aesthetic imperfection. She's always been this way, a perfectionist of sorts. I cannot live up to her standards, I often cut corners. My mom was blessed with wonderful parents. My grandfather was an engineer and my grandmother was a pediatrician. My grandmother practiced medicine until the age of 87 and was an avid reader. She insisted that I spend at least an hour every day researching my patients' conditions, and another hour reading on general medical subjects.
On my father's side, I can trace my ancestors back to the legendary Alexei "Candy King" Abrikosov. This side of my ancestry has seen many famous scientists, physicians, and other members of Moscow intelligentsia. My grandparents from this side were psychiatrists working with Professor Gannushkin. In the Vasilyev household, living cells were the favourite pets. They kept infusoria in glass jars on the windowsills. Cells played the starring roles in the fascinating films that Professor Vasilyev shot through a microscope. This was an entirely novel idea. You could see those cells moving, crawling, propagating, and interacting with each other. Professor Vasilyev started a scientific school dedicated to the study of the cytoskeleton in normal and cancerous cells. In 1957, as a rare exception and as homage to the young scientist's talent, member of the Academy of Sciences Blokhin helped Vasiliev to get a six-month internship at the Chester Beatty Cancer Research Institute in London, followed by a fellowship at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, USA. Both trips were important milestones in Yuri Vasilyev's life. They helped him develop a cosmopolitan mindset for life. Now Vasilyev knew that world-class science was unthinkable without freedom and unhindered communication. Although, following his first two trips, my father was banned from international travel for more than 15 years, just because he had refused to write a special report for the First Department.

— What was it like, your upbringing?
— My parents did so much for me, they gave me a safety net for my whole life. I was taught English, choreography, and painting from the age of five. I went to the art school for children at the Pushkin Museum, which still feels like home to me. There was always classical music playing at home. My parents introduced me to Vadim Sidur, Vladimir Voynovich, Vladimir Weisberg, Boris Birger, and the Gelstein family. Gdal Gelstein became my first mentor in medicine.
Nadezhda Mandelstamwas an important person in my life. Even as a kid, I loved Mandelstam's poetry and I adored Nadezhda Yakovlevna. I remember desperately wanting to be like her, which led me to seek out boys among my classmates who wrote poetry. I would bring those verses to Nadezhda Yakovlevna to look at. She would give them a serious read and then tell me they weren't bad but definitely not worth suffering over. From the number of my parents' friends, the strongest influence in my life was Israel Gelfand, the great mathematician.
Later, much to their dismay, I became an extremely high-maintenance and difficult teenager. In order to motivate me to study biology for the university, my poor father had to start tutoring my friend alongside me. Sunday mornings by 11 o'clock when our lesson began, he would put on his dress pants and shoes, a clean shirt. And I might just pop out of my room and say: "I'm going out, dad. Got stuff to do". He didn't yell or anything, but he would get really upset with me. He would tutor my friend without me on those days. During one of our conversations, I told him all of a sudden, "don't worry, daddy, I'm just like you". And suddenly he felt completely at ease. But that didn't keep me from skipping a whole school year.

— How did it happen?
— In my 7th grade, I switched schools and  transferred to Moscow's famous Lyceum "Second School". I broke the news in August, right before the new school year, as we were going home from the movie Fantômas with Gelfands and my parents. Instead of giving me encouragement, Gelfand said: "Boring! Why don't you jump to 8th grade at least". And I did. But eventually, being younger than my classmates and coming from a semi-aristocratic background, I always somehow felt small in class, inexperienced. I felt I wasn’t street smart. I painfully taught myself to smoke at 14, then asked my classmates to teach me to drink alcohol, I skipped classes unapologetically, and I came home late. By the end of the term, I had an A+ in advanced mathematics, a D in technical drawing, and failed chemistry.
Another story that tells a lot about my upbringing pertains to a later period. In university, I picked hematology as my major, because I figured it was the most advanced field of medicine at the time. And naturally, I wanted to pursue my career independently from my parents. I joined this hematology study group where it was customary to show top students’ work to Andrey Vorobyov himself. I worked hard for a year to get there. So here we are, on our way to an appointment with Vorobyov. We open the door, and Andrei Ivanovich  goes, "Well, if it isn't Yuri Vasilyev's daughter!" Everything was ruined. I came home really angry and showered my father with this anger: I had worked so hard for a year to accomplish something on my own, only to be called "Vasilyev's daughter" again! My father looks at me and says: "Don't be so upset. There's a tried and true method, existing since 1937: you can renounce me publicly in a newspaper". I have to admit, this worked like a charm.

— Elena, you and your husband started to manage Davidovskiy Hospital in 1994. Now it's a beautiful building with art in the lobbies and distinctive facade decorations. You have one of the strongest cardiologist teams, even by international standards. Back in the mid-1990s, the place had just one cardiograph, and even that sole piece of equipment had a wire mix-up, keeping the doctors mystified by unusual heart attack patterns. You started off your reforms by introducing clinical guidelines into medical practice, which swiftly elevated the hospital's standards. Which reforms were a real struggle?
— It took the longest time to convince the nurses that smiling was part of their job. A couple of dozen people left their jobs soon because of our reform. This upset me so much I cried into my pillow every night. My father's support was crucial. He told me the people who'd left would not have been able to work the way people work everywhere in the world. He said new people would come and make a real team. And so it happened.

— One of your earliest innovations was to start treating patients according to international guidelines, including those you helped design and develop. We know that randomized studies revolutionized medicine in the 1980s and 1990s. What changed in cardiology?
— In cardiology, they had used all known sodium channel blockers for years to treat PVC. In 1992, a study was undertaken to find out how PVC treatment impacted the prognosis for patients with coronary heart disease. Interestingly, the group that did not receive the treatment had approximately three times fewer deaths than those who did. This was a startling revelation, a complete shock! Nowadays, stereotypical patients are treated according to clinical guidelines, which, in turn, are based on large-scale randomized trials designed to minimize the chances of subjective evaluation of the outcome. Clinical guidelines are typically divided into three sections: the first articulates the doctor's must-do's in the event of a particular diagnosis. The third section details the forbidden actions.  And the second part lists the procedures left to the doctor's decisions. This is where the doctor gets to show real class. This is arguably the most interesting part, offering an opportunity to be creative. Creativity is becoming increasingly rare in modern medicine. When we began to enforce the guidelines for real in our hospital, very soon we saw a triple decrease in heart attack mortality.

— In public mind, a good doctor is often seen as some sort of a visionary or a detective like House MD.
— I've met a few examples of Doctor House in my life. One is my husband, Alexander Shpektor, but the first was my mentor, Professor Naum Dolgoplosk. When I first met him, I knew I was in the presence of another genius like Gelfand. The two had a lot in common, most notably the inner freedom to pose out-of-the-box questions, commitment to rigorous logic, and propensity to seek correct, if often unconventional, solutions. It was the first time I met a doctor who resembled a mathematician in so many ways. That's when I decided to make cardiology my major.

— What was he a genius?
— He began his career as a brilliant diagnostician who laid the foundation of cardiography. Professor Dolgoplosk had outlined numerous electrocardiographic markers of a myocardial infarction about 20 years before it was done in the USA. But the thing is that his findings were published in the Clinical Medicine journal that no one read, let alone translated into English. His career was sudden;y and dramatically snapped  at the "doctors' plot".
When we met, he was a little-known regular head of a regular department of a regular hospital, and always seemed a little angry at the world. I remember the time I first met him. He was standing there, in the middle of the hall: a weird, tiny figure, acting all moody. I felt reluctant to approach him, and he didn't seem particularly glad to see me either. "Follow me", he said tersely. They were expecting him in the intensive care unit where he was to do rounds. Naum Alexandrovich walked up to a dying patient, placed his hand on the patient's chest, and declared, "interventricular septal rupture two centimeters below the apex". And he moved to the next patient. He didn't use any equipment, he simply didn't have any. Later, when the autopsist confirmed his diagnosis, everyone wondered. "Naum Alexandrovich, how did you know?" they asked. He just said: "Check the statistics. That's the region where ruptures occur 75% of the time". What he really did was, he could feel the blood flow with his hand: when there is a rupture, blood seeps out through a pretty small aperture in the interventricular septum, making a kind of gurgling sound. He assumed only the location of the rupture based on statistics. He had this adage he often cited to us, "rare diseases happen rarely, and frequent diseases happen frequently". He was strictly rational. He despised the intuitive approach and all forms of medical mumbo jumbo. He could stage a magic show for patients, but later he would go and debunk the magic for the  insiders. Those debunking sessions were the most fun.

— Medical statistics had in fact predated today's international guidelines.
— That's true. And it's important that doctors know how to perceive them. At first we took the guidelines as our Holy Bible. Later on, Alexander and I spent a few years working with the European Society of Cardiology, serving on some of its committees and working groups. It was enlightening to see that organization from inside, to witness how recommendations are birthed amid debates and uncertainties. In the end, you get a good sense of the rules you can go against and those that are impregnable.

— There are rules that you can go against?
— I have a somewhat philosophical story to tell in this regard. I've been a pretty good cook since a young age. Once, at some congress in Uzbekistan, I asked them to let me kind of stand and watch while their top chef prepared pilaf. And I noticed that, contrary to all pilaf recipes, he kept lifting up the lid and stirring the food. I couldn't hold back and said: "I'm sorry, you cannot do that with pilaf!". "No, you cannot", he agreed, "But if you know what you're doing, you can". I think this is exactly about guidelines as well. You can break the rules, but you have to be able to explain why you do it in the given circumstances. Overall, I don't find the image of an 80s Soviet doctor very appealing. Back then, doctors thought they could assume an almost priest-like role, make all decisions for the patient, determine what to tell and what not to tell the patient, and do all this with complete disregard for the patient's rights.

— Wasn't Soviet healthcare the best in the world?
— That's largely a myth. In the early 20th century, and perhaps until the 1950s, we still had remnants of pre-1917 Russian medicine legacy. It had been inspired by the solid German classical school of medicine back then and was pretty much in sync with the Western medicine. This was the case partly because our informational isolation was not yet complete, and partly because there wasn't any notable technological gap in treatment methods. The groundbreaking achievements in Soviet medicine were usually associated with the names of outstanding individuals. Then, at some point, faculty salaries were largely increased in the Soviet Union. A professor could be making 500 rubles a month while a regular doctor was making 100. Naturally, the cushy jobs were soon taken by doctors who were Communist Party members. This wasn't always the case everywhere, but education standards began to decline. Alexander and I got lucky: when we first joined the faculty, we worked under the mentorship of Professor Viktor Orlov, who was not a Communist Party member. He subscribed to the American Journal of Cardiology, which was not easy at the time in the USSR, and generally did his best to maintain a global perspective.

— So when did we start falling behind majorly?
— This happened with the advent of certain new technologies and randomized studies, which the Soviet Union did not admit into its clinical mainstream. Meanwhile, with the emergence of these new technologies, the Russian literature's image of a charming doctor-loner, the village doctor, an intellectual and naturally brilliant diagnostician, was pushed into the background. Today, alongside the fundamental openness of global science, a paramount place in medicine belongs to teamwork. We have achieved a triple reduction in mortality rate from acute myocardial infarction in Moscow, primarily thanks to the streamlined process logistics. Or take, for example, an acute ischemic stroke, the condition when a blood clot gets into the blood vessels of the brain and has to be urgently removed. If the clot is extracted in time, the symptoms may go away as quickly as in a matter of hours. This is really impressive. And such a procedure requires the smooth teamwork of ambulance doctors, radiologists, X-ray endovascular surgeons, neurologists, cardiologists, and others. When cutting-edge technology got into our hands, we realized how crucial it is to have the patient on the operating table within the first few hours. Consequently, a work group was created, consisting of top doctors under the direction of Alexander Shpektor. First, the “heart attack network” was set up in Moscow, and more recently, also the “stroke network”. When it just started, many were skeptical, saying it would never work in Moscow as it does in Europe, but ultimately it did. Of course, all this didn't happen in a day. I must say that Moscow's healthcare continues to get better, and not just in cardiology. Exciting vistas of opportunity are offered by new digital technologies, including Big data solutions. Moscow set up a citywide patient database 3 years ago, thanks to which one can instantly get a sense of any healthcare issue in the city. For instance, it helps to identify all patients who have suffered a heart attack but are yet to be prescribed the appropriate therapy. We are now launching a new program to configure custom therapy for patients with heart failure. This condition is one of the hardest scenarios to handle in cardiology.

— Elena, this hospital has started to resemble a museum under your leadership. The main building, which houses the high-tech clinic, is a  delicately renovated 18th-century mansion. The main staircase is adorned with a stained glass panel depicting St. Jerome removing a thorn from the paw of a melancholic looking lion. The lobbies and halls in all buildings are lined with sculptures, paintings, and photographs — all genuine works of art. Is there a reason why you pay so much attention to decorations?
— I believe in the healing power of the ambience. A comfortable, like-home environment similar to what they used to cultivate in the Central Clinical Hospital doesn’t work because it can loosen a person in a way. Neither does a hospital need any contrived positive slogans, those would annoy some of those who are feeling ill. However, the impact of true art is different: it genuinely breaks the person's obsession with their illness, thereby easing their pain. I personally hand-pick sculptures and paintings for the hospital. I can attest that Maxim Kantor's stained glass art has a tangible healing effect. Our patients call him Dr. Powderpill.

— Do you know where your appreciation of art comes from? There are hundreds of hospitals that don't think about that side of things, at least not yet.
—I think I received my first lesson in aesthetics from Israel Gelfand, who loved to teach children. It may sound harsh, but he "hovered" over every child, saw a potential genius in each one, and he gave the child his all. He made every child feel there was nothing they could not do. I think some people may have been harmed through this. Gelfand set his standards so high a person might spend a lifetime struggling to live up, always feeling they were somehow remiss. In a way, I'm still trying to prove something to him even now. It's a conversation that never ends.
Once we went to our dacha together. Gelfand asked me to show him my notebooks, which were in total disarray, the typical penmanship chaos of a first-grader. Then he told my parents: "Go take a walk. Lena and I will stay here and practice writing numbers". And we got to work, drawing perfect ones, twos and threes, line after painstaking line. He would say: "You'll never get anywhere in life if your numbers aren't nicely drawn". He also used to say that mathematics is primarily a handcraft. You don't know what goes on with the numbers unless you write them down. I believe those were my earliest lessons in aesthetic appreciation, and they've mattered to me all my life.

— How did you end up doing medicine with that handwriting?
— I'm a pretty disorganized person generally, but my notes are always in order. All figures and indications must be written clearly. It's an aesthetic touchstone. To tell you the truth, I went to med school as an act of defiance, because everyone wanted a mathematics career for me.

— What do your daughters do? Were you able to inspire them with your love of science and medicine? What's your family like?
— I have a great family. My husband and I have been together for 30 years, and I mean, together full time, at home and at work. My eldest daughter Nadia is an alumna of the School of Psychology at Moscow State University. She is a brilliant psychotherapist at the helm of the Institute of Gestalt Therapy. She has two wonderful sons. My youngest daughter Anya, following her degree in Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University, enrolled in postgraduate studies at Oxford, doing Neurobiology. I feel excited about her research on human memory. My sister Galya and her husband Andrei, both medical alumni, have lived and worked in the US for years. And we have been talking about my parents for quite a bit now. This may not be obvious, what with my busy schedule and all, but I really put family above everything else in my life.

— Elena, you get so many things done. Is there anything you don't have time for?
— The pandemic left me no time to feel lazy, I even only had time to read on weekends. Frankly, my favorite thing to do is to do nothing: just lie in bed, reading or daydreaming. Gelfand told me he owed his most notable discoveries to laziness. More than once, feeling too lazy to get up from the couch and grab a reference book, he would start reconstructing some formula only to stumble on a new solution. I, too, think it's important to know how to be lazy. It's probably the best thing in life!