The Botanist Who Defied Stalin
Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Universality” issue in April, 2021.
In 1913, 26-year-old Russian biologist Nikolai Vavilov went to the John Innes Horticultural Institute to study at the feet of legendary geneticist William Bateson. While there, Vavilov attended lectures at nearby Cambridge University, and could often be seen bicycling around the city in his trademark suit and tie. He and Bateson became lifelong friends, and the Mendelian genetics that Bateson and his team championed—and that remains the core of the field of genetics to this day—was burned into Vavilov’s scientific soul.
The visit to England was cut short as a result of World War I and Vavilov returned home, where he began doctoral work on plant disease resistance, in part to alleviate the constant shortages of food in Russia. As he did, he began a one-man crusade to scour the planet collecting crop varieties that were disease resistant and might also shed light on the evolution of domesticated plants. For the next 25 years Vavilov’s travels and adventures, recounted in detail in his massive work Five Continents, would make Indiana Jones look like a Boy Scout. He collected hundreds of thousands of seed samples from 60 countries, beginning with Iran and the Pamir region in 1916, Afghanistan in 1924, Algiers, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Palestine, Jordon, Ethiopia (Abyssinia), Greece, Cyprus, Crete, Italy and Spain in 1926. And he was only just getting started. Other collecting missions took him to China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, as well as Mexico, the United States, Canada, Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.
Reputed to sleep only four hours a night, Vavilov used the extra time to master more than a dozen languages, so he could converse with local farmers to learn what they knew about the plants he was studying, and to write more than 350 papers and books.
On his first trip in 1916, he was arrested at the Iran-Russia border typhus, but carried on.
