Gennadiy N. Lepeshkin: The main technical building, where the work was done, was built in 1982. However, no work was done there, because there were no researchers to start any... any production. The main production and the start of the work coincided with the arrival of researchers in the organization. That was in 1984.
At that time, researchers who knew the true purpose of the site arrived from various cities in Russ... the Soviet Union
and they started doing the work needed to get production going.
The work was complicated, and there was a shortage of people, initially there were around forty people, and then the numbers of staff began to increase. And then when the site was working at full capacity, which was four years later, there were approximately 750 people working there, trained and prepared to do the necessary work.
At first, I was appointed director of the special safety techniques department, which is the most important department, with the most serious implications, without which no work with pathogens can be undertaken...
All of this took a great deal of time, of course, but the work was nonetheless interesting, and the researchers who came, and who would go on later to constitute the core management, helped me in this work.
The director, Kanatzhan Baizakovich Alibekov, was actively and seriously involved in all of this back then. After a while, after just a month, I was appointed acting deputy scientific director and I worked with Alibekov to prime the facility and prepare the site to start the work with pathogens.