Nicolai Vavilov (1887-1943) was the world’s pioneer in figuring out where our food comes from and how it has evolved over the centuries.

Nicolai Vavilov, the most celebrated collector of food plants in history, (IPGRI)

He didn’t sit in a comfortable office or work in a brightly-lit laboratory and do his research on neat sheets of paper. Vavilov, like the best of explorers of all sorts, liked to put on his boots and go to where the action was. In his case, “the action” was most of the little-known parts of the world.

His written record of his explorations, in fact, was titled Five Continents, and it covered expeditions Vavilov made between 1916 and 1940. Although he made a remarkable contribution to our understanding of plants and their origins, he was horribly mistreated by his own country, and he died in prison, convicted of crimes he did not commit.

Vavilov’s searches were for what his colleagues have called “agricultural civilizations.” These were isolated places where human civilization was rare and plant biodiversity was free to expand. It was in those undisturbed regions where diversity spread from the plants that were native to the area — the places that Vavilov called the centers of diversity and the centers of origin.

The amazing thing, writes one biographer, is that Vavilov didn’t just explore aimlessly. Before he left on one of his expeditions, he had a good idea of what he was looking for and where me might find it. He used his knowledge of geography, climate, and plant characteristics to figure out where the centers of diversity and origin might be, and then went to them.

Still, exploring for Vavilov was not like taking a stroll to the corner store, even though he had the use of an automobile and the help of a note-taker and photographer. He “penetrated into inaccessible mountain areas,” writes the biographer, “enduring hardships and risking his life.”

Chief among the hardships Vavilov endured were those brought on by politics and government intrigue. On his expeditions, the scientist had continual problems obtaining permission to visit foreign countries or regions. It was a time, as now, when nations were deeply suspicious of one another and assumed that foreign visitors might be spies and troublemakers. In one sense, plant collectors are spies. They visit distant lands to collect seeds and plants and take them home with them. The political leaders of those distant lands might think that the seeds and plants “belong” to them. Even today, there are fierce arguments about ownership of growing organisms, particularly those that might be useful in expensive medicines. (See the forthcoming AboutBiodiversity section on Who owns diversity?)

But Vavilov persisted, aided by his growing reputation as one of the twentieth century’s outstanding scientists, and doors opened around the world. He conducted expeditions in Europe, Asia, the countries of the Mediterranean, Africa, South America, and North America. His fellow scientists in far-away nations bestowed dozens of honors on him.

He collected plants and seeds and sent them back to his All-Union Institute of Plant Industry, which he headed for 20 years. There they were classified, preserved, their characteristics catalogued, and grown out (“multiplied,” in agricultural science language). From this material, Vavilov and his colleagues bred new varieties. He had a special interest in potatoes, which have long been a major food crop in Russia, and in the grains, including wheat and rye.

But at home, the doors to enlightened scientific inquiry were closing. In Russia, the government was overthrown by the political movement that was to evolve into the communist party. In 1929, the revolutionary leader Joseph Stalin instituted massive changes in the country’s agricultural economy. What they amounted to was putting bureaucrats in charge — government workers who knew nothing about agriculture but who were experts at shuffling the papers on which they had written unworkable rules and regulations.

The results were millions of farmers starving, farmlands unable to grow crops, and long lines in city food-rationing centers. The government, now known as the Soviet Union, needed someone to blame for this. It pointed the finger at its plant breeders. This included Vavilov. At first, his prestige and popularity offered him some insulation from attack, but gradually the bureaucrats sharpened their aim on him.

It gets worse.
To make matters worse, the government started believing the theories of Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural scientist who rejected the ideas of Mendel and doubted the existence of genes. Instead, Lysenko preached, it was possible to treat seeds in special ways that made them produce more food to feed the starving population.

Lysenko called his method “vernalization.” It involved changing a plant’s growing conditions rather than its genetic structure. Winter wheat, for example, could be buried in the snow, then planted in the spring, making it produce vastly increased yields later in the year. Vernalization, on the scale Lysenko promoted it, was one of those get-something-for-nothing schemes that sounded too good to be true, because it was.

Vavilov was among those who praised some of Lysenko’s work, perhaps out of politeness and a willingness to consider any “scientific” solutions to Russia’s food shortages. But those in government still needed someone to blame. Vavilov, who had done so much to fill the bellies of his countrymen, was removed from his academic positions and replaced by Lysenko. One by one, Vavilov’s colleagues were arrested and charged with conspiring to harm the government. Vavilov’s proven ideas about the genetic makeup of food crops were labelled “reactionary” and contrary to the official government position.

In the summer of 1940, while the famed scientist was on a collecting trip in Ukraine, several men drove up in a car, invited him to step inside, and took him away. Vavilov was under arrest by the Soviet secret police, charged with sabotage, spying against his nation, and plotting “the breakdown and decline of Socialist agriculture in the USSR.” At the time of his arrest, Vavilov’s Institute of Plant Industry contained some 200,000 specimens of plants, many of them collected by the scientist himself and all of them of value to his nation’s agriculture.

Vavilov was sentenced to death by firing squad. While awaiting his execution, he died in prison. His biographers have written that this brilliant scientist, who had done so much to put food in the mouths of his fellow Russians, starved to death in his prison cell.

Traveling genes. Nicolai Vavilov explained his thinking about searching for plants in a 1926 book: “Different plants, long dispersed by people migrating far beyond the borders of their native land, have been subjected to the effects of natural and artificial selection so that they have produced new forms and sometimes new subspecies and species, which are of great interest.” He offered an example of wheat and barley brought by traveling humans from southwestern Asia into China. These plants, he wrote, “have, owing to the effects of the monsoon climate (heavy summer rains), produced special subspecies there which are sharply different from the original forms.”

Much of the information presented here on Nicolai Vavilov is based on Vavilov’s book, Five Continents, translated from the Russian by Doris Love, published in 1997 by the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI), Rome; and from Vavilov and his Institute, by Igor G. Loskutov, published in 1999 by IPGRI.

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