Soviet Dissident Orlov Reported Terminally Ill

MOSCOW — Dissident Soviet physicist Yuri Orlov, suffering from tuberculosis, will die soon unless he is released from internal exile in Siberia, an American scientist who shared the 1967 Nobel Prize for medicine said Thursday.

Prof. George Wald said he raised the case in a talk Wednesday with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but he replied that he had not heard of Orlov.

“He said this is a very big nation and he doesn’t know what happens to every individual in it,” Wald told reporters.

Orlov is a former chairman of the Moscow branch of the Soviet Helsinki human rights monitoring committee and has been ill with tuberculosis for several years. He was sentenced in 1978 to seven years in a labor camp and five years’ internal exile for anti-Soviet agitation.