Jakob Segal (17 April 1911 – 30 September 1995) was a Russian-born German biology professor at Humboldt University of Berlin in the former East Germany. He was one of the advocates of the conspiracy theory that HIV was created by the United States government at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin and two former members of East Germany's secret police accused Segal of being a Soviet disinformation agent who worked for the KGB.
Early life and education
right|thumb|200px|Tombstone of Jakob and Lilli Segal at [[Zentralfriedhof Friedrichsfelde, Berlin]]
Segal was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, into a Lithuanian Jewish family, the son of Hermann Segal, a merchant from Kaunas (1880–1941), and Rebekka (née Schlimakowski; 1887–1941). He had an older brother, Moshe, an electrician. When he was 8, his family moved to Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He was educated in Berlin and Munich, where he joined the Red Students' League (Roter Studentenbund) and the Communist Party of Germany. In 1933, he immigrated to France, where he furthered his studies in Toulouse before earning a doctorate in physiology from the Sorbonne in 1936.
During the Second World War, he and his German wife, Lilli (née Schlesinger, whom he had met at university in Toulouse) joined the resistance as part of the Main-d'œuvre immigrée and went underground. All of his family, including his parents and brother, were killed in the Holocaust. Lilli was arrested in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz in July 1944, but was sent to a work camp and survived by escaping that November. In 1946, he joined the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.