LIT FOUNDER RAY SCHIAVONE WANTS TO BECOME THE FIRST SEED-BREEDER TO GO PUBLIC

RAY SCHIAVONE MAY WELL BE THE NIKOLAI VAVILOV OF OUR TIME. Vavilov, in case you don’t know, was a Soviet botanist who believed selective seed breeding could end the food shortages that plagued his mismanaged country. Traveling across the globe in search of rare plant specimens, he founded what at the time was the world’s largest seed bank.

For most of his life, Vavilov’s revolutionary ideas were met with doubt. He was ridiculed, imprisoned and tortured by Stalin-endorsed pseudoscientists that doubted the now irrefutable laws of Mendelian Genetics. During the deadly Siege of Leningrad, Vavilov’s students starved rather than subside on the potential food sources their teacher