A Man of Science
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (Николай Иванович Вавилов) was, for most of his life, the preeminent geneticist and agronomist in the Soviet Union, perhaps the world. Between 1911 and 1940 he formulated the genetic law of serial homology, headed the highest level plant science and genetics institutes of the U.S.S.R., traveled the world collecting samples for creating the massive seed bank at Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), and much more scientific work. Despite his tragic death at age 55, Vavilov stands as one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century.
Born outside of Moscow in 1887, failed crops and food shortages drove Vavilov to devote his life to ending famine. Graduating from the Moscow Agricultural Institute he traveled Europe studying plant immunity before settling as a professor at the University of Saratov. By 1924 Vavilov was named head of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL, in its Russian acronym), and won the Lenin Prize - roughly equivalent to a Nobel Prize in the U.S.S.R. - for his 1926 work “Centers of Origins of Cultivated Plants”. During this time of his life Vavilov traveled extensively in Asia. the Americas, and Europe collecting vast quantities of seeds both for his research and for storage at the Leningrad seed bank.
Throughout the 1930s Vavilov served in numerous scientific leadership positions, including at one time a seat on the U.S.S.R. Central Committee. Sadly, this was not to last. Trofim Lysenko's pseudo-scientific ideas - denying Mendelian genetics and asserting that an organism's acquired traits are passed to their offspring - were embraced at the highest levels of the Communist party, eventually becoming the state-sanctioned version of heredity. As Lysenkoism grew to prominence and Stalin commenced his purges, Vavilov used what authority remained to him in efforts to secure positions for his colleagues and to help get their research into safe hands. He himself continued to work, right up to his arrest - when taken into custody, Vavilov was on a field expedition in Ukraine collecting plants with students. Vavilov took incarceration in stride, delivering over 100 hours of lecture on plants and genetics to his fellow prisoners before succumbing to the harsh conditions of his confinement on 26 January 1943.
By Stalin’s death in 1953 the tides had begun turning on Lysenkoism and genetics slowly made its way back into Soviet science. Vavilov was posthumously cleared of the charges against him, and he became again a widely held example of scientific brilliance. Today he is honored to have two of Russia’s prominent institutions named for him: the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics in Moscow and the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry at Saint Petersburg, where you can still find the seeds Nikolai Vavilov collected.
