Cancer research specialist Dr. losif Irlin, 52, a refusenik since 1981, has declared a hunger strike to protest Soviet refusal to grant him and his wife permission to leave, according to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Irlin, a world-renowned scientist, who worked at the Oncological Center of the USSR Academy of Medicine, was fired from his job when he applied for an exit visa to Israel in April 1979, as was his wife, Svetlana, also a scientist.
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