Vietnamese Soldier Flying a Chinook to Save His Family

People in besieged St. petersburg taking water from crush-holes. Source: RIA Novosti

In September 1941, when High german forces began their siege of Leningrad, choking food supply to the metropolis's two one thousand thousand residents, one group of people preferred to starve to expiry despite having plenty of 'nutrient.'

Every bit the invading Germans poured into the urban center (at present St Petersburg), scientists and workers at the Constitute of Plant Industry barricaded themselves inside their vaults. They weren't trying to save their lives but rather the future of humanity. For, they had the unenviable job of protecting the greatest seed drove in the world from both hungry Soviet citizens and the rampaging German Army.

Every bit the siege dragged out for 900 days, i by ane these heroic men started dying of hunger. And withal not 1 of them touched the treasure trove of seeds they were guarding – literally with their lives.

That'due south non where the cruel irony ends. The human who had been responsible for this nifty drove of seeds, Nikolay Vavilov, Russian geneticist and constitute geographer, lay dying of starvation in a Soviet prison house in Saratov.

Nikolay Vavolpv. Source: wikipedia.org

Seeding the hereafter

Vavilov had travelled five continents to written report the global food ecosystem. Calling information technology a "mission for all humanity'', he conducted experiments in genetic breeding to increase subcontract productivity. Fifty-fifty as Russia was undergoing revolutions, anarchy and famines, he went about storing seeds at the Constitute of Plant Industry.

Vavilov dreamed of a utopian futurity in which new agricultural practices and science could one day create super plants that would grow in whatsoever environment, thus ending earth hunger.

"He was one of the first scientists to really listen to farmers – traditional farmers, peasant farmers effectually the earth – and why they felt seed diversity was important in their fields," says Gary Paul Nabhan, an ethnobiologist.

Nabhan who has chronicled Vavilov's life in 'Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine', continues: "All of our notions nearly biological variety and needing variety of foods on our plates to keep united states healthy sprung from his piece of work 80 years ago. If justice be done, he would be as famous as Darwin or Luther Burbank."

Stalin's scapegoat

There wasn't much justice going around in Joseph Stalin'south time. Vavilov wanted to increase farm productivity to eliminate recurring Russian famines. Early, he defended the Mendelian theory that genes are passed on unchanged from one generation to the next. He became the main opponent of Stalin's favoured scientist, the Ukrainian Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics and developed a pseudo-scientific move called Lysenkoism. His dishonest theories about improved crop yields earned Stalin'southward support, following the famine and loss of productivity resulting from forced collectivization in several regions of the Soviet Union in the early on 1930s. In fact, Lysenko's influence on Stalin ensured that scientific dissent from his theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948.

Stalin's collectivisation of private farms had led to reduced yields across the Soviet Union. The dictator now needed a scapegoat for his failure and the famine. He chose Vavilov. In Stalin's warped view, Vavilov's was responsible for the famines considering his process of carefully selecting the best specimens of plants would take numerous years to comport fruit.

Vavilov was collecting seeds on Russian federation's borders when he was picked upward by secret service agents. Amid the chaos of World War II, no one, including his son and his wife, knew where he was.

Author Geoff Hall writes in 'Reading Nikolay Vavilov': Before his show trial, Stalin's police, seeking a confession, had subjected Vavilov to 1,700 hours of brutal interrogation over 400 sessions, some lasting 13 hours, carried out past an officer known for his extreme methods. Before his arrest, during the long rise in influence of Lysenko, beginning in the 1920s, Vavilov, dissimilar Galileo, had refused to repudiate his beliefs, saying, "Nosotros shall go into the pyre, nosotros shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions".

"After over a yr-and-a-one-half of eating frozen cabbage and mouldy flour, he died of starvation," says Nabhan. "The homo who taught us the most near where our food comes from and who tried for over 50 years to end famine in the world died of starvation in the Soviet gulag."

The twelvemonth was 1943 and the Germans were however in Petrograd. A dozen of Vavilov's scientists holed up in their secret Leningrad vault starved to death while guarding their hoard of 370,000 seeds. "I of them said it was hard to wake upward, it was difficult to go on your feet and put on your clothes in the morn, but no, information technology was not hard to protect the seeds once you had your wits well-nigh you," writes Nabhan. "Saving those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover later on war was more of import than a single person's comfort."

Vavilov's legacy

Although Lysenko's 25-year domination of Soviet biological science ensured that a considerable part of Vavilov's seeds became degraded and unusable, Russian writer Genady Golubev wrote in 1979 that "80 per cent of all the Soviet Matrimony'southward cultivated areas are sown with varieties" derived from Vavilov's drove.

Vavilov led 115 expeditions to 64 countries such as Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, Islamic republic of iran, Taiwan, Korea, Spain, Algeria, Palestine, Eritrea, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Mexico and the U.s.a., to collect seeds of ingather varieties and their wild ancestors. Based on his notes, mod biologists following in Vavilov's footsteps are able to document changes in the cultural and concrete landscapes and the ingather patterns in these places.

Rafael J. Routson of the Department of Geography and Regional Evolution, University of Arizona, Tucson, says, "Vavilov took precise notes that tin all the same exist used to appraise the climate and crop correlations, pressure level readings for elevation, and he described geographic patterns in crop diversity."

Co-ordinate to Russian geneticist Ilya Zacharov, Vavilov was "a person of inexhaustible energy and unbelievable efficiency". In a 2005 article in the Journal of Bioscience, Zacharov wrote: "During his relatively short life, he achieved a surprising amount: in his expeditions he travelled all over the world, he formulated very of import postulates in genetics, he wrote more than than 10 books, and carried out the gigantic job of organizing a system of agricultural institutions in the USSR."

Nabhan talked to a farmer in Federal democratic republic of ethiopia who said Vavilov had "an uncanny ability...to pinpoint areas of high diversity". An elderly agronomist in Republic of kazakhstan, who as a boy had guided Vavilov into forests of wild apples, remembered that "he figured out everything...from footling more than a day in the field". Indeed Vavilov moved at breakneck speed, ofttimes commenting, "fourth dimension is short, and at that place is and then much to do. One must hurry".

Little did Vavilov know he was hurrying to an unmarked grave in one of Stalin'due south gulags.

Had the great scientist lived, the Soviet Union would never have experienced the bad harvests that played havoc with cardinal planning. The country's chronic agronomical inefficiencies played a more important office than the Afghan State of war in ultimately bringing down the entire system.

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Source: https://www.rbth.com/blogs/2014/05/12/the_men_who_starved_to_death_to_save_the_worlds_seeds_35135

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