Malika Abdullahodjaeva

Malika Samatovna Abdullahodjaeva was born on 28 November 1932 in Moscow, into a family of students at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. She grew up in Tashkent, finished School No. 110 with a gold medal in 1950 and entered the medical faculty of the Tashkent State Medical Institute.

As a student (1953–1956) she worked in the research circle of the pathological anatomy department and chaired the student scientific society. After graduating with honours in 1956 she went on to postgraduate study at the Brain Institute of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, in its histochemistry laboratory. She defended her candidate dissertation on 27 December 1960 and her doctoral dissertation in 1968, and was confirmed as a professor in 1970.

Her teaching and research career was tied to Tashkent's medical schools. In the early 1960s she set up a Central Research Laboratory at the institute, and from 1963 to 1969 she also headed the pathomorphology department and histochemistry laboratory at the Research Institute of Radiology, Radiobiology and Oncology. In 1969 she won the competition for the chair of pathological anatomy; when the institute was split in 1990 she led the same chair at the Second Tashkent Medical Institute until 2000.

Her research dealt chiefly with the pathology of the nervous system and with immunopathology: she studied the ultrastructure of the hippocampus in health and disease and summed up the results in a 1981 monograph. She also worked on the pathogenesis and pathological anatomy of pregnancy complications, and reference works call her the founder of transplantation immunopathology in Uzbekistan.

From 1972 to 1997 she was chief pathologist of Uzbekistan's Ministry of Health. On her initiative pathology departments were set up in the country's hospitals, an internship in pathological anatomy was introduced and the Republican Pathological Anatomy Centre was created; she went on to direct it. From 2005 the centre began studying the role of human herpesvirus 8, the Epstein–Barr virus and other viruses in cancer.

Abdullahodjaeva wrote teaching manuals, among them ones for foreign students, and an atlas for dentistry students. In 1997–1999 she published the two-volume textbook «Fundamentals of Human Pathology» for third-year medical students, the first such textbook in Uzbek. She was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan in 1995 and a full member (academician) in 2000.

In 1980 she received the title of Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR, and she was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honour (1976) and the Order «Mehnat shuhrati» (2003). In 2006 she was named Hero of Uzbekistan and given the Gold Star. Malika Abdullahodjaeva died on 26 June 2018.