Nikolai Vavilov

• 1. Introduction

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  Nikolai Vavilov carried a pet lizard in his pocket through the halls of the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy. That small, eccentric detail captures something essential about the man: a scientist who moved through the world with an intensity and curiosity that left everyone around him slightly breathless. He graduated with a dissertation on snails as pests, went on to travel across five continents collecting seeds, built the world's largest seedbank, and was described as having a mind that never slept and a body with a near-unmatched capacity for enduring physical hardship.

  Born on the 25th of November 1887 in Moscow, Vavilov would go on to become the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a recipient of the Lenin Prize. He would also die of starvation in a Soviet prison in 1943, condemned by the same state he had devoted his career to serving.

  How does a man who set out to end famine end up starving in a prison cell? And what happens to the seeds he spent a lifetime gathering when war and ideology come for them too?

• 2. The Hunger That Drove Him

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  Vavilov's father had grown up poor, repeatedly undone by crop failures and food rationing. That inheritance shaped his son's life's work before Vavilov ever set foot in a laboratory. From an early age, ending famine was not a career aspiration for him; it was something closer to an obsession.

  After entering the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy in 1906, he worked at the Bureau for Applied Botany and at the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology, building a foundation in both the practical and the theoretical sides of plant science. From 1913 to 1914, he traveled through Europe studying plant immunity alongside the British biologist William Bateson, who helped lay the groundwork for the entire science of genetics.

  His first expedition in 1916 took him to Iran, where he collected 171 samples of legume crop seeds previously unknown to Russia. Among them were beans, chickpeas, clovers, lentils, and peas. Those 171 samples planted a key idea in his thinking: that many cultivated plants, including legumes, had originated in centers of diversity in Southwest Asia. The expeditions that followed would spend the next two decades testing and extending that hypothesis across almost every continent on earth.

• 3. Mapping the Origins of Food

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  In 1921, Vavilov traveled to Canada and the United States. He concluded that North America was not a center of plant diversity, determining instead that the American centers of origin lay in Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America. On his return trip he collected seeds in Britain, France, Holland, Germany, Poland, and Sweden.

  By 1926, he had traveled the Mediterranean: France, Greece, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, and islands including Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus. He paid particular attention to the chickpea, noting how it contributed to soil fertility and added protein to the diets of people and animals across the region. He also returned from Palestine with seeds of a white lupin that came to maturity early, making them useful in plant breeding.

  That same year, in Sudan and Ethiopia, he identified another center of diversity. Three years later, expeditions to China, Japan, and Korea located yet another center in Japan. In 1927, he presented his full theory of centers of origin at the Fifth International Congress of Genetics in Berlin.

  His last expedition, in 1932, took him across Latin America: Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. He attended the Sixth International Congress of Genetics in Uruguay before setting out across the continent.

  By 1933, the seed collection at his institute in Leningrad held over 148,000 specimens, making it the largest of its kind in the world. He had also documented 3,000 distinct types of Triticum vulgare wheat, describing each as perfectly recognizable morphologically. J. Scott McElroy later observed that it is difficult to imagine the time, energy, and knowledge required to collect and describe that many types of a single species.

• 4. Lysenko and the Politics of Science

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  Trofim Lysenko joined the staff of Vavilov's institute and began to attack the foundations of genetics itself. He argued that genetics was nonsense invented by the Roman Catholic monk Gregor Mendel, and he promoted his own Lamarckian views on inheritance and evolution, alongside the idea of improving crop varieties through vernalization.

  Lysenko had Joseph Stalin's ear. Stalin summoned Vavilov to the Kremlin and mocked him there. In 1936, Lysenko arranged to have Vavilov removed from his post as head of the institute.

  The pressure extended to the international scientific community. In 1932, Vavilov had proposed hosting the seventh International Congress of Genetics in the USSR in 1937. He was elected chairman for this purpose in 1935. The following year, the Politburo cancelled the event outright. The congress eventually convened in Edinburgh in 1939 instead. During the opening ceremony, an empty chair was placed on the stage to mark Vavilov's involuntary absence.

  While collecting seeds in Ukraine in August 1940, Vavilov was arrested by the NKVD. He was accused of spying for the British and of ruining Soviet agriculture. After interrogations, he made a false confession. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1941.

• 5. Prison, Starvation, and an Empty Chair

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  In 1942, Vavilov's death sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment. He died in prison in Saratov in January 1943. The prison's medical documentation records that he had been admitted to the hospital a few days before his death, with diagnoses of pneumonia, dystrophy, and edema. The death certificate itself lists only decline of cardiac activity as the cause. Some authors maintain the actual cause was starvation.

  His second wife was the geneticist Elena Ivanovna Barulina, a specialist on lentils and assistant head of the institute's seed collection. Their son Yuri was born in 1928. His son Oleg from his first marriage was born in 1918.

  In 1955, a hearing of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union voided Vavilov's life sentence, as part of the de-Stalinization review of Stalin-era death sentences under Nikita Khrushchev. By the late 1950s, his reputation had been publicly rehabilitated, and he was being called a hero of Soviet science.

• 6. The Siege and the Seeds

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  When German forces encircled Leningrad, beginning a siege that would last twenty-eight months, the Soviet government ordered the evacuation of art from the Hermitage Museum. No one ordered the evacuation of the 250,000 samples of seeds, roots, and fruits stored in what was then the world's largest seedbank.

  A group of scientists at the Vavilov Institute took matters into their own hands. They boxed up a cross section of seeds, moved them to the basement, and took shifts guarding them. None of the guards ate the seeds. By the end of the siege in the spring of 1944, a number of them had died of starvation.

  Meanwhile, parts of Vavilov's collection stored in German-occupied territories, primarily in Ukraine and Crimea, were seized by a German unit led by Heinz Brucher. Many of those samples were transferred to the Schutzstaffel Institute for Plant Genetics, which had been established near Graz, Austria.

  The survival of the Leningrad collection through the siege stands as one of the more extraordinary acts of scientific preservation in the twentieth century. Those seeds were not abstractions to the people guarding them. They were the work of a man who had believed, from boyhood, that such collections could eventually mean the difference between famine and survival.

• 7. What He Left Behind

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  Vavilov is credited as the first botanist to recognize the need for a seedbank as such, and his collection at the institute supplied the germplasm for more than three quarters of the legume varieties bred in the Soviet Union. By 2010, the institute held 43,000 legume samples drawn from 160 species across 15 genera. The institute was renamed after him in 1968, on the occasion of its 75th anniversary.

  One of the more quietly remarkable ideas Vavilov introduced was what is now called Vavilovian mimicry. Studying the evolutionary histories of cereal crops, he observed that weeds mixed in with crop seeds would gradually evolve to look more and more like the crop itself. Whenever farmers or winnowing machines removed weed seeds, only the seeds that most closely resembled the crop survived. Vavilov described cereal rye as a secondary crop, one that had evolved through exactly this process. In 1982, the biologist Georges Pasteur formally proposed the name Vavilovian mimicry for the phenomenon.

  His commemoration has taken many forms: a monument unveiled in Saratov in 1997, the Vavilov Award established in 1965, the Vavilov Medal established in 1968, and the minor planet 2862 Vavilov, discovered in 1977 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh, named after Nikolai and his brother Sergey. A crater on the far side of the Moon bears their name as well. The story of the scientists who guarded the seedbank during the siege inspired novelist Elise Blackwell's 2003 novel Hunger, which in turn inspired the Decemberists' song When The War Came on their 2006 album The Crane Wife, a song that mentions Vavilov by name.