Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (; – 26 January 1943) was a Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist who identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants. He devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, maize and other cereal crops that sustain the global population.
Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin. As a result, Vavilov was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death in July 1941. Although his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died in prison in 1943. In 1955 his death sentence was retroactively pardoned under Nikita Khrushchev. By the 1960s his reputation was publicly rehabilitated and he began to be hailed as a hero of Soviet science.
Early years and education
Vavilov was born into a merchant family in Moscow, the older brother of physicist Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov. Despite his strict upbringing in the Orthodox Church, he was an atheist.
His father had grown up in poverty due to recurring crop failures and food rationing, and Vavilov became obsessed from an early age with ending famine.
Vavilov entered the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy (now the Russian State Agrarian University – Moscow Timiryazev Agricultural Academy) in 1906. During this time he became known for carrying a pet lizard in his pocket wherever he went. He graduated from the Petrovka in 1910 with a dissertation on snails as pests. From 1911 to 1912, he worked at the Bureau for Applied Botany and at the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology. From 1913 to 1914 he travelled in Europe and studied plant immunity, in collaboration with the British biologist William Bateson, who helped establish the science of genetics.
Academic career
From 1917 to 1920, he was a professor at the Faculty of Agronomy, University of Saratov. From 1924 to 1935 he was the director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences at Leningrad. Impressed with the work of Canadian phytopathologist Margaret Newton on wheat stem rust, in 1930 he attempted to hire her to work at the institute, offering a good salary and perks such as a camel caravan for her travel. She declined, but visited the institute in 1933 for three months to train 50 students in her research.
While developing his theory on the centers of origin of cultivated plants, Vavilov organized a series of botanical-agronomic expeditions and collected seeds from every corner of the globe. In 1927, he presented the centers of origin to the public on the Fifth International Congress of Genetics in Berlin (V. Internationaler Kongress für Vererbungswissenschaft Berlin). In Leningrad, he created the world's largest collection of plant seeds. Vavilov also formulated the law of homologous series in variation. He was a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, President of All-Union Geographical Society, and a recipient of the Lenin Prize.
Political eclipse and persecution
In 1932, during the sixth congress, Vavilov proposed holding the seventh International Congress of Genetics in the USSR. After some initial resistance by the organizing committee, in 1935 it agreed to hold the seventh congress in Moscow in 1937. The Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences decided to support the idea and asked the Communist Party for its approval, which it gave on 31 July 1935. Vavilov was elected chairman of the International Congress of Genetics.
However, on 14 November 1936 the Politburo decided to cancel the congress. The seventh International Congress of Genetics was postponed until 1939 and took place in Edinburgh instead. The Politburo prohibited Vavilov from travelling abroad; during the Congress's opening ceremony an empty chair was placed on the stage as a symbolic reminder of Vavilov's involuntary absence.
Vavilov encountered the young Trofim Lysenko and at first encouraged Lysenko's work. However, Vavilov changed his mind and became an outspoken critic of Lysenko, because Lysenko did not believe in genetics and Vavilov feared that Lysenko's ideas could be disastrous for Soviet agriculture. Vavilov publicly criticized Lysenko both at home and while on foreign trips.
However, Stalin believed in Lysenko's theories and, as a result, so did the rest of the Soviet government. The Soviet authorities suspected that Vavilov was trying to sabotage Soviet agriculture with bad science, and their suspicions were aggravated by his associations with other scientists who had been convicted of espionage, some of whom falsely implicated Vavilov in counter-revolutionary activities.