complex cells. In 1914 he was prosecuted for raping more than two dozen girls. He had earlier escaped Saint Petersburg in 1886 and the Crimea in 1898 for fear of being prosecuted for similar crimes. He was dismissed from Kazan University, and escaped to France. In 1918 he moved to the Conservatoire Botanique in Geneva, where he worked on Jules Paul Benjamin Delessert's lichen collection. Death In Geneva, he became seriously depressed, ran out of money, and on 9 January 1921 he was found dead in his hotel room, having tied himself up in his bed with a mask which was supplied with an asphyxiating gas from a metal container. It appears that his suicide was connected to his utopian beliefs, reflected in his 1903 book of stories, Earthly Paradise, or a Winter Night's Dream. Tales from the 27th century. As an atheist, his dreamed-of utopia was to be scientifically-based, involving the evolution of a perfect human race. The Earthly Paradise describes specially-bred castes of human including one of neotenised sexual adults with child-like features, who were put to death at the age of 35, as they could not be happy in old age. Further, he held extreme ideological beliefs on eugenics and antisemitism. He actively assisted the right-wing nationalist organisation, the Kazan Department of the Union of Russian People, and provided secret assistance to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in hunting down Jews and supposed traitors. Symbiogenesis Mereschkowski argued that the cell organelles, the nucleus and the chloroplast, are the descendants of bacteria that evolved into an intracellular symbiosis with amoebae. His work was influenced by the French botanist Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper who had noted that chloroplasts resembled cyanobacteria. Mereschkowski's ideas are according to K. V. Kowallik "strikingly" reflected in the modern symbiogenesis theory developed and popularised by Ivan Wallin and Lynn Margulis, and now widely accepted. The modern view is that two endosymbiotic events did take place, one by incorporating bacteria that became the mitochondria of all eukaryotes, and another soon afterwards in the line that became the plants to form chloroplasts. Around the turn of the century, Mereschkowski formed a sizeable lichen herbarium, containing over 2000 specimens collected from Russia, Austria and around the Mediterranean. The collection remains at Kazan University. It had recently been shown that each lichen species consisted of a mutualistic symbiosis between a fungus and one or more algae. This may have