Kurban Babaev

Kurban Latypovich Babaev (Qurbon Babayev) was a geologist, Doctor of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences and professor who studied the pegmatites, skarns and ore deposits of Central Asia. He was born on 26 December 1910 in Akmolinsk (now Astana, Kazakhstan) into a white-collar family. He received his early schooling in his home town, including a teaching-oriented boarding school.

In 1929 he came to Tashkent, finished the workers' preparatory faculty of the Central Asian Industrial Institute and in 1931 entered its mining faculty, graduating in 1936. While still a student he worked as a field collector and foreman and served as deputy head of the Uchimchak prospecting party; on Professor T. N. Qori-Niyoziy's recommendation he also taught mathematics to the national group of the geophysics department at Central Asian State University. In 1933 he accompanied Academician A. E. Fersman around deposits of the Chatkal mountains; Babaev regarded himself as Fersman's pupil and later developed his ideas on pegmatites.

From 1938 he led prospecting and exploration parties and served as chief geologist in the geological administrations of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, searching for tungsten, cobalt and gold. In 1940 in Frunze he reported to Fersman on the discovery of a cobalt deposit, which according to biographical accounts remains the only one in Central Asia. In 1942 he went to the front with the 5th Separate Guards Sapper Battalion; demobilised after a concussion in 1943, he became chief geologist of the Meliksu mine, where tungsten output rose several times over in a short time, for which he received a certificate of honour from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR.

From 1946 he worked at the Institute of Geology of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, rising from senior researcher and laboratory head to deputy director for science and then director. He studied the skarns of the Koytash tungsten deposit and in 1949 defended his candidate's dissertation on the Koytash skarn field. He then turned to the granitoid massifs of western Uzbekistan (a monograph on the Altyntau massif, 1954) and to granite pegmatites (the monograph "Granite Pegmatites of Central Asia", 1960). In 1962 he defended his doctoral dissertation at the All-Union Institute of Mineral Resources in Moscow and in 1963 received the title of professor. From 1946 to 1965 he also taught at the Tashkent Polytechnic Institute.

On 27 July 1957 Babaev was appointed the first director of the newly created Central Asian Research Institute of Geology and Mineral Resources (SAIGIMS) of the USSR Ministry of Geology, and in 1958 he was elected chairman of the council of directors of the ministry's institutes. In 1959 the institute under his leadership completed the first large survey of the region's mineral wealth, the "Map of Mineral Resources of Central Asia" at 1:500,000 with a 70-sheet monographic description, which later exploration work relied on.

He represented Uzbek science at the International Geological Congresses in Mexico (1956), Delhi (1964, where he was elected chairman of a section) and Moscow (1984), and from 1983 was a member of the International Association on the Genesis of Ore Deposits. He published 168 scientific works and 75 further specialised ones, supervised 18 candidate's dissertations, edited the "Bulletin of Research Works of SAIGIMS" and the institute's "Scientific Notes", and sat for four terms as a deputy of the Leninsky district council of Tashkent. In 1976 he was named Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR and in 1981 "Honorary Prospector of the USSR"; he held the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, the Order of the Patriotic War and a number of medals.

Babaev died in Tashkent on 5 August 2000 and was buried at the city's Teshik-kapkak cemetery.