The Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, a botanical institute dedicated to the study of plant life, was founded in the city of Petrograd in 1894. (The city is successively named Petrograd, Leningrad and St. Petersburg.) In March, 1921, a thirty-three-year-old man named Nikolai Vavilov, a bright young star in Russian science, was appointed as director of the penniless institute. His dream was to turn the institute into the world’s first seed bank, a facility to store and preserve seeds for future use in agriculture, research, and conservation.
Vavilov's inquisitiveness about the natural world drew him to biology. In 1906 he joined the Timiryazev Academy of Agriculture in Moscow. He developed a longing to see his theoretical work produce material benefits. He learned that Russian farmers reaped the poorest harvests anywhere in Europe. He knew that around half the harvest depended on the quantity of fertilizer used to feed the crop, and a quarter on the method of cultivation. The final quarter, however, depended on the quality of the seed grain. If he could improve the varieties of grain — higher yielding, better adapted, and more resistant — it might be possible for Russian farmers to improve their yields.
IN 1913 Vavilov went to England and met top geneticists there. Bateson, who had coined the term genetics just eight years earlier, had a profound influence on Vavilov's thinking. He was particularly impressed by the idea that potentially valuable wild varieties of wheat, rye, barley, and other crops had been overlooked by farmers in bygone centuries. Bateson believed these previously plants might carry invaluable genetic qualities that could be bred into today's crops.
When Vavilov arrived at Petrograd (then called Leningrad), he found out that the small collection of seeds at the Plant Institute had all but been destroyed. Looters had got into the building and eaten some of the seeds. He acquired a three-story nineteenth-century tsarist palace grand enough to house the world’s first seed bank. He collected a staff of keen, dedicated individuals committed to his vision. He took no interest in a person’s background, whether they came from peasant stock or a more well-heeled background.
At that time, Russia was gripped by nationwide famine. WWI had led to a civil conflict that had crippled the country’s food production. Inflation, profiteering, the collapse of food supplies, and the breakdown of authority had led to a political coup that had brought to power the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Drought and crop failures worsened these human-made problems and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were now starving to death.
Everywhere conflict, natural disaster, and the destruction of habitat threatened to make certain types of plants extinct. Once destroyed, these specimens and their unique characteristics would be irretrievably lost; no amount of genetic tinkering could bring them back. The extinction of unexamined plant varieties could mean the loss of world-changing medicines, or varieties that could enable communities and nations to protect themselves against famine.
Vavilov mounted a series of expeditions to collect and catalog ancient, domesticated varieties of wheat, barley, peas, lentils, and other crops. He also sought their wild relatives, which, he reasoned, might prove useful in his experiments to breed unique varieties. He went to Iran, US, Mongolia, the Mediterranean, Italy, the Middle East, western China, Japan and many other countries in search of seeds and sent samples back to the Plant Institute to be sorted, cataloged, and stored.
Vavilov's aim was to cross-breed different varieties of possibly overlooked crops to make supercrops, as we would term them today. So he would breed types of wheat, for example, that are disease-resistant or have a very high yield or able to withstand different climates. In twenty years, the Institute had become renowned throughout the world. The idea of a seed bank was novel, and the long-term value of a repository of genetic plant material had yet to be fully understood at the time.
He got many prestigious awards. In Britain he was an elected member of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an honorary member of the Linnean Society of London and the Royal Horticultural Society, and of the Royal Society of Biology. In the United States he became a member of the American Geographical Society, and an honorary member of the Botanical Society of America. He was awarded honorable associations and honorary doctorates in Germany, India, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria.
By 1934, Vavilov had established more than four hundred research institutes and numerous stations around the Soviet Union. His journal, the Bulletin of Applied Botany, Genetics and Plant Breeding, had become a leading international publication in its field. Under his direction, the Soviet Union had become the world leader in plant breeding showing how countries might protect their populations from famine and starvation.
But storm clouds were gathering.
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