Nikolai Vavilov

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 ==

suggested that plants were domesticated in China, Hindustan, Central Asia, Asia Minor, Mediterranean, Abyssinia, Central and South America. 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. Later expeditions visited places including the high plains of Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Khoresm oasis, Japan, and Taiwan. In his institute at Leningrad, he created the world's largest collection of plant seeds; by 1933, it contained over 148,000 specimens. In 1929 he went to China, Japan, and Korea, locating another center of cultivated plants in Japan. 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." == 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. Imprisonment and death While collecting seeds in Ukraine in August 1940, Vavilov was arrested by the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) and imprisoned for his opposition to Lysenko; Some authors assert that the actual cause of death was starvation. == Personal life ==

Vavilov's son Oleg with his first wife Yekaterina Sakharova was born in 1918. That marriage ended in divorce in 1926, after which he married geneticist Elena Ivanovna Barulina, a specialist on lentils and assistant head of the institute's seed collection. Their son Yuri was born in 1928. == Honors and distinctions ==

Vavilov became the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. He was a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. == Legacy ==

Seedbank diversity in Vavilov's office Vavilov realized that many useful plant varieties would be lost through human action unless specific steps were taken to save them. He was the first botanist to grasp the need for a seedbank, and he was an expert germplasm collector. Economic impact Vavilov combined the skill of collecting distinct varieties of crop plants with theoretical understanding of their significance in botany and the ability to put this knowledge to practical use. In particular, he created the collection of germplasm of leguminous crop plants held at the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry (renamed after him in 1967). In turn, this collection 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, from 160 species in 15 genera. Vavilov's work has been continued by later botanists at the institute, for example breeding transgressive forms of lupin (a legume) resistant to the fusarium wilt fungus. By the late 1950s, his reputation was publicly rehabilitated, and he began to be hailed as a hero of Soviet science. Vavilovian mimicry While studying the origins and evolutionary history of crop plants including cereals, Vavilov observed that weeds are inevitably included with crop seed by seed contamination. A consequence, he stated, 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 would be 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, Georges Pasteur proposed the name 'Vavilovian mimicry' for this process. Commemoration Today, a street in downtown Saratov bears Vavilov's name. Vavilov's monument in Saratov near the end of Vavilov Street was unveiled in 1997. The USSR Academy of Sciences established the Vavilov Award (1965) and the Vavilov Medal (1968). In 1968, the institute was renamed after Vavilov in time for its 75th anniversary. The crater Vavilov on the far side of the Moon is named after him and his brother, a physicist. Media The story of the researchers at the Vavilov Institute during the Siege of Leningrad was fictionalized by novelist Elise Blackwell in her 2003 novel Hunger. That novel was the inspiration for the Decemberists' song "When The War Came" in the 2006 album The Crane Wife, which also depicts the Institute during the siege and mentions Vavilov by name. In 1987, the Shevchenko National Prize was awarded to Anatoliy Borsyuk (film director), Serhiy Dyachenko (script writer), and Oleksandr Frolov (camera) for the film Star of Vavilov (Russian: "Звезда Вавилова") about Vavilov's work. In 1990, a six-part documentary entitled Nikolai Vavilov (Russian: Николай Вавилов) was created as a joint production of the USSR and East Germany. == Books ==

In Russian • Земледельческий Афганистан. (1929) (Agricultural Afghanistan) • Селекция как наука. (1934) (Breeding as science) • Закон гомологических рядов в наследственной изменчивости. (1935) (The law of homology series in genetical mutability) • Учение о происхождении культурных растений после Дарвина. (1940) (The theory of origins of cultivated plants after Darwin) • Географическая локализация генов пшениц на земном шаре. (1929) (The Geographical Localization of Wheat Genes on the Earth) In English • The Origin, Variation, Immunity and Breeding of Cultivated Plants (translated by K. Starr Chester). 1951. Chronica Botanica 13:1–366, link • Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants (translated by Doris Löve). 1987. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. • Five Continents (translated by Doris Löve). 1997. IPGRI, Rome; VIR, St. Petersburg. == See also ==