Nikolai Vavilov

• 1. A Lizard In A Pocket

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  Nikolai Vavilov entered the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy in 1906. He carried a pet lizard in his pocket wherever he went during those early years. This odd habit marked him as a young man who saw science as a form of worship despite his strict Orthodox upbringing. His father had grown up in poverty due to recurring crop failures and food rationing. Vavilov became obsessed from an early age with ending famine. He graduated from the academy in 1910 with a dissertation on snails as pests. From 1913 to 1914, he travelled in Europe and studied plant immunity. He collaborated with the British biologist William Bateson who helped establish the science of genetics.

• 2. Seeds Across Seven Continents

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  The first expedition took place in 1916 when Vavilov traveled to Iran. He collected 171 samples of legume crop seeds new to Russia including beans chickpeas clovers and lentils. These finds suggested that many cultivated plants came from a center of origin in Southwest Asia. Later expeditions visited places including the high plains of Central Asia Afghanistan and Japan. The 1921 expedition visited Canada and the United States where North America was not found to be a center of plant diversity. In 1926 he travelled the Mediterranean visiting France Greece Spain Portugal and islands including Sardinia Sicily Crete and Cyprus. By 1933 his institute at Leningrad contained over 148,000 specimens of plant seeds.

• 3. Guardians Of The Seedbank

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  The Leningrad seedbank was preserved and protected through the 28-month long Siege of Leningrad. While the Soviets had ordered the evacuation of art from the Hermitage Museum they had not evacuated the 250,000 samples of seeds roots and fruits stored there. A group of scientists boxed up a cross section of seeds and moved them to the basement. They took shifts protecting the collection while the city starved. Those guarding the seedbank refused to eat its contents even though by the end of the siege in the spring of 1944 a number of them had died of starvation. The prison's medical documentation mentions diagnoses of pneumonia dystrophy and edema as well as general weakness before Vavilov died in 1943.

• 4. The Politics Of Genetics

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  Trofim Lysenko joined the staff of the institute and began to oppose Vavilov. He argued that genetics was nonsense invented by the Roman Catholic monk Gregor Mendel. Lysenko proposed his own Lamarckian views of inheritance and evolution including the idea of improving a crop variety by vernalization. Stalin summoned Vavilov and mocked him in the Kremlin. In 1936 Lysenko arranged for Vavilov to be sacked from his post as head of the institute. While collecting seeds in Ukraine in August 1940 Vavilov was arrested by the NKVD. He was accused of spying for the British and ruining Soviet agriculture. After interrogations he made a false confession and was sentenced to death in 1941.

• 5. Weeds That Look Like Crops

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  Vavilov observed that weeds are inevitably included with crop seed by seed contamination. A consequence was that the weed would evolve to appear progressively more like the crop. Whenever a farmer or a winnowing machine removed as many weed seeds as possible only the weed seeds that most closely resembled the crop would survive. Thus selection was applied unconsciously by the farmer or by the winnowing machine used to separate the seeds. Vavilov described the cereal rye which he believed had evolved in this way as secondary crops. In 1982 researchers proposed the name 'Vavilovian mimicry' for this process.

• 6. A Pardon From The Grave

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  In 1955 Vavilov's life sentence was voided at a hearing of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union. This action was undertaken as part of a de-Stalinization effort to review Stalin-era death sentences in the time of Nikita Khrushchev. By the late 1950s his reputation was publicly rehabilitated and he began to be hailed as a hero of Soviet science. Today the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in St. Petersburg still maintains one of the world's largest collections of plant genetic material. The institute was renamed after him in 1968 in time for its 75th anniversary. A minor planet named 2862 Vavilov was discovered in 1977 by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh.