Nikolai Vavilov



Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (Николай Иванович Вавилов, November 25 1887 – January 26 1943) was a prominent Russian botanist and geneticist best known for having identified the centres of origin of cultivated plants. He devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, corn, and other cereal crops that sustain the global population.

He was born into a merchant family in Moscow, the older brother of renowned physicist Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov. After graduating from the Moscow Agricultural Institute, he worked at the Bureau for Applied Botany and at the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology during the years 1911-1912. From 1913 through 1914 he travelled in Europe and studied plant immunity, in collaboration with the British biologist William Bateson, who founded the science of genetics.

While developing his theory on the centres of origin of cultivated plants, Vavilov organized a series of botanical-agronomic expeditions, collected seeds from every corner of the globe, and created, in Leningrad, the largest collection of plant seeds in the world (a seedbank that was diligently preserved even throughout the 28 months of the  Siege of Leningrad, despite starvation and one of Nikolai's assistants starving to death surrounded by edible seeds). He also formulated the law of homologous series in variation. He was a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, President of All-Union Geographical Society and a recipient of the Lenin Prize.

In 1940 he was jailed as a defender of the "bourgeois pseudoscience" (genetics) in a struggle with Lysenkoism, and died of malnutrition in a prison in 1943. The majority of his genetic samples were seized by a German collecting command set up in 1943, and the samples were transferred to the SS Institute for Plant Genetics, which had been established at the Lannach Castle near Graz, Austria. However, the command was only able to collect the samples stored in agricultural research stations located within the territories occupied by the German armies, mainly in Ukraine and Crimea. The main gene bank in Leningrad was thus not affected. The leader of the German command was Heinz Brücher, an SS officer who was also a plant genetics expert.

Today, the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in St.Petersburg still maintains one of the world's largest collections of plant genetic material. The Institute originated as the Bureau of Applied Botany in 1894, but was reorganized in 1924 into the All-Union Research Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops, and in 1930 into the Research Institute of Plant Industry. Nikolai I. Vavilov was the head of the institute from 1921 to 1940. In 1968 the Institute was renamed after Vavilov in time for its 75 anniversary.

During most of his career Vavilov was assisted by his deputy Georgy Balabajev.

The standard botanical author abbreviation Vavilov is applied to species he described.

Timeline

 * 1887 - born November 25, in Moscow.
 * 1911 - graduated from the Moscow Agricultural Institute.
 * 1917-1921 - professor of the agronomy department of the Saratov University.
 * 1919 - theory of the immunity for plants.
 * 1920 - formulation of the law of homology series in genetical mutability.
 * mid 1920s - Vavilov befriends the young peasant Trofim Lysenko and begins taking him to scientific meetings
 * 1921(-1940) - chairman of the applied botanics and selection section in Petrograd, which in 1924 was reorganized into the All-Union Institute of Applied Botanics and New Crops and in 1930, into the All-Union Institute of Plant Cultivation, with Vavilov being director until August, 1940.
 * 1926 - Lenin Award.
 * 1930—1940 - head of the genetics laboratory in Moscow, later reorganized into the Institute of Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
 * 1931—1940 - President of the All-Union Geographical Society.
 * Late 1930s - Lysenko, who has conceived a hatred for genetics is put in charge of all of Soviet agriculture
 * 1940 - arrested for allegedly wrecking Soviet agriculture; delivered more than a hundred hours of lectures on science while in prison
 * 1943 - died imprisoned and suffering from dystrophia (faulty nutrition of muscles, leading to paralysis), in the Saratov prison.

The USSR Academy of Sciences established the Vavilov Award (1965) and the Vavilov Medal (1968).

Works

 * Земледельческий Афганистан. (1929) (Agricultural Afghanistan)
 * Селекция как наука. (1934) (Selection 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)

Works in English

 * The Origin, Variation, Immunity and Breeding of Cultivated Plants (translated by K. Starr Chester). 1951. Chronica Botanica 13:1–366
 * Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants (translated by Doris Love). 1992. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-40427-4
 * Five Continents (translated by Doris Love). 1997. IPGRI, Rome; VIR, St. Petersburg ISBN 92-9043-302-7