Nikolai Vavilov

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (Russian: Никола́й Ива́нович Вави́лов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪtɕ vɐˈvʲiləf] ; 25 November [O.S. 13 November] 1887 – 26 January 1943) was a Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist who identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants. His research focused on improvement of wheat, maize and other cereal crops. Vavilov became the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He was a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, a recipient of the Lenin Prize, and president of All-Union Geographical Society. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin. As a result, Vavilov was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death in July 1941. Although his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died in prison in 1943. In 1955, his death sentence was retroactively pardoned under Nikita Khrushchev. By the late 1950s, his reputation was publicly rehabilitated, and he began to be hailed as a hero of Soviet science.

Early years and education Nikolai Vavilov was born on 25 November 1887 into a merchant family in Moscow, the older brother of physicist Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov. Despite his strict upbringing in the Orthodox Church, he was an atheist. His father had grown up in poverty due to recurring crop failures and food rationing, and Vavilov became obsessed from an early age with ending famine. Vavilov entered the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy (now the Russian State Agrarian University – Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy) in 1906. During this time, he became known for carrying a pet lizard in his pocket wherever he went. He graduated from the Petrovka in 1910 with a dissertation on snails as pests. From 1911 to 1912, he worked at the Bureau for Applied Botany and at the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology. From 1913 to 1914, he travelled in Europe and studied plant immunity, in collaboration with the British biologist William Bateson, who helped establish the science of genetics.

Academic career

Throughout his career, Vavilov went on a series of botanical-agronomic expeditions, collecting seeds from many parts of the world, and developing theories of their origins. The first expedition, in 1916, was to Iran, where he collected 171 samples of legume crop seeds new to Russia, including beans, chickpeas, clovers, everlasting peas, lentils, and peas. These finds suggested to him that many cultivated plants including legumes came from a centers of origin in Southwest Asia. In 1917, Vavilov was a professor at the Faculty of Agronomy, University of Saratov. In 1920, he became Director of the Bureau of Applied Botany in Leningrad. Later expeditions visited places including the high plains of Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Khoresm oasis, Japan, and Taiwan. The 1921 expedition visited Canada and the United States; Vavilov stated that North America was not a center of plant diversity, finding later that the centers of origin in the Americas were in Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America. On his way back from America he visited Western Europe, collecting seeds in Britain, France, Holland, Germany, Poland, and Sweden in 1922. From 1924 to 1935, he was the director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences at Leningrad. He travelled the Mediterranean in 1926, visiting France, Greece, Spain, Portugal, North Africa and islands including Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus. He took special interest in legumes such as the chickpea, which he found contributed to soil fertility and added protein to the diets of people and their animals around the Mediterranean. Another expedition visited Jordan, Palestine, and Syria; he returned with seeds of a white lupin from Palestine; they became useful in plant breeding as they came to maturity early. Later expeditions went to Sudan and Ethiopia, where he identified a center of diversity in 1926.

In 1927, Vavilov presented his theory of centers of origin to the public at the Fifth International Congress of Genetics in Berlin. In his institute at Leningrad, he created the world's largest collection of plant seeds; by 1933, it contained over 148,000 specimens. The collection became internationally famous, attracting praise from overseas but hostile attention from Joseph Stalin. In 1929 he went to China, Japan, and Korea, locating another center of cultivated plants in Japan. In 1932, on his last expedition, he travelled widely in Latin America, visiting Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay after attending the Sixth International Congress of Genetics in Uruguay.

Vavilov's work on the genetic diversity of crop plants across the world spanned the concept of centers of origin, the Darwinian problem of speciation, plant breeding, and a geographical approach to studies of crops, as well as the law of homologous series in variation. He is remembered for his contributions to the improvement of varieties of wheat, maize and other cereal crops that sustain the global population. Vavilov was a man of enormous energy, described as having "a mind that never slept and a body which for its capacity for enduring physical hardships can seldom have been matched." For example, he documented 3,000 types of Triticum vulgare wheat, calling them all "perfectly recognizable morphologically"; J. Scott McElroy comments that it is difficult to imagine the time, energy, and knowledge required to collect and describe so many types of one species.

Eclipse

Genetics conference debacle In 1932, during the sixth congress, Vavilov proposed holding the seventh International Congress of Genetics in the USSR in 1937. In 1935, Vavilov was elected chairman of the International Congress of Genetics for this purpose, but in 1936 the Politburo cancelled the event; the congress eventually took place in Edinburgh in 1939 instead. The Politburo further prohibited Vavilov from travelling abroad; during the Congress's opening ceremony an empty chair was placed on the stage as a symbolic reminder of Vavilov's involuntary absence.

Lysenko's opposition

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