Vavilov, Nikolaj Ivanovic (1887-1943) http://plants.jstor.org/person/bm000008815 http://www.jstor.org Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the contributing partner regarding any further use of this work. Partner contact information may be obtained at http://plants.jstor.org/page/about/plants/PlantsProject.jsp. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Page 1 of 5 Vavilov, Nikolaj Ivanovic (1887-1943) Herbarium Natural History Museum (BM) Collection Plant Collectors Resource Type Reference Sources First name Nikolaj Ivanovic Last name Vavilov Dates 1887-1943 Specification Plant collector Description Vavilov, N.I. Group: S. Organisation: WIR. Collected: (c. 1905-1932) UK & Ireland: UK; Europe: France, Germany, Greece, Italy (Sardegna), Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden; Western Asia: Afghanistan, Cyprus, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Palaestine, Syria, Yemen; Japanese region: Japan; Chinese region: China; Indo-China: North Korea; North Africa: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia; Tropical Africa: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan; North America: Canada (Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan), USA (Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming); Central American Continent: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico (Yucatán), Panama; West Indies: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago; Tropical South America: Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru; Brazilian region: Brazil; Temperate South America: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay. Associates: Barulina, E.I. (1895-1957) (co-collector, wife). 2:675, 36:1076 Russian botanist. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, one of the twentieth-century’s greatest geneticists and plant geographers, began collecting in childhood when he maintained a small herbarium at his home in Moscow. After graduating from the Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1911, with a prize thesis on garden slugs, he worked for the Bureau of Applied Botany and the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology. In his pioneering Page 2 of 5 paper from 1912, ‘Genetics and Agronomy’, he outlined a programme for the improvement of crops through the application of Mendelian genetics. Before the First World War, he travelled in Europe and studied plant immunity with the British geneticist William Bateson. He continued his investigations in Russia as a lecturer at the University of Saratov, one of his first discoveries being Triticum dicoccum Schübl. var. timopheevii Zhuk. (= Triticum timopheevii (Zhuk.) Zhuk.), a wheat taxon resistant to several diseases. During the Russian Civil War, the university became a stronghold for the Bureau of Applied Botany. An early favourite of Lenin, Vavilov was elected as its new head in 1920, and soon thereafter moved his laboratory to St Petersburg. There he assumed a high post in the USSR Central Executive Committee and the directorships of three other major institutions: the All-Union Academy of Agriculture, the Institute of Genetics and the National Geographic Society of the USSR. In 1926 he received the Lenin Award for his work on the origin of cultivated plants. Outside his country, he belonged to the British Royal Society, the Indian Academy of Sciences, the National Academies of Czechoslovakia, Scotland, and Germany, the Linnean Society of London and the American Botanical Society. He served as vice-president of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics and had been elected president of the Seventh, to be held in Edinburgh in 1939, but was prevented from attending. By the mid 1930s, at the height of the Stalinist purges, he had become the main opponent of one of Stalin’s favourites, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, whose Lamarckian methods promising quick crop improvement, fitted the political climate. Lysenko’s rejection of the laws of heredity expanded into political accusations against geneticists. Governmental support was withdrawn from the genetics programmes organised by Vavilov, who became the target of an intense smear campaign by ill-wishers. Between 1934 and 1940, 18 of his staff members were arrested. Vavilov himself was arrested in 1940 while on a collecting trip in the Ukraine, and was sentenced to death for allegedly sabotaging socialist reforms of agriculture through his pursuit of the ‘bourgeois pseudoscience’ of genetics. After two years on death row, his sentence was commuted to 20 years imprisonment. He died of dystrophia at Saratov prison on 26 Page 3 of 5 January 1943. Vavilov was one of the first scientists to recognise the need for an intensive programme of collection, research, and preservation to develop sustainable agricultural production. He created one of the first and the most extensive collections of plant seeds in the world and, starting in 1916, organised over 100 botanical expeditions in the major agricultural areas of the world, paying special attention to leguminous crops, as sources of protein and increased soil fertility. By 1940, more than 250,000 plants, collected as specimens, seeds, and live plants, were being studied taxonomically in more than 150 experimental stations set up by Vavilov throughout the Soviet Union, at one time employing more than 20,000 workers. In 1943, Vavilov’s genetic samples were seized from occupied territories and transferred to the SS Institute for Plant Genetics at Lannach Castle, Austria. The main gene bank in Leningrad, however, was unaffected. Throughout 28 months of siege, despite dire hunger in the population, the stock of edible seeds had not been raided but was diligently preserved by Vavilov’s assistants, one of whom died of starvation. Many of Vavilov’s expeditions were designed to verify his theory that cultivated plants originated in areas of particular diversity and richness in species and types. Seven of the world’s diversity centres for cultivated plants were eventually identified, most of them sites of the origin of civilizations. He was also interested in what linguistics, specifically agricultural language, can tell us about the origin of plants and the mutual influence of agriculture between human populations. Vavilov personally participated in expeditions to more than 40 countries on five continents in search of wild relatives of cultivars. Following his first expedition, to Iran and Pamir, in 1916, he formulated the law of homologous series in variation, a measure of genetic relationship, which held that the more similar species are, the more similar their patterns of variation. In 1924, after his expedition to Afghanistan, he received a special gold medal from the Russian Geographic Society for ‘exploits in geography’. His last foreign collecting trip was to Latin America in 1932. Since his official rehabilitation, hundreds of books and articles, as well as a 1990 Russian TV series, have been produced about his life and scientific accomplishments. He is commemorated in the names of streets Page 4 of 5 in Moscow and St Petersburg; scientific awards, medals, and research institutes (the Russian Society of Geneticists and Breeders, the Institute of General Genetics of the Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Plant Industry, and the Saratov Agricultural Institute); glaciers in the Pamir Mountains and the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago; and, jointly with his renowned physicist brother Sergey, a minor planet (2862 Vavilov) and a crater on the dark side of the moon. Contributor Natural History Museum (BM) References 2. Brummitt, R.K. & Powell, C.E., Authors Pl. Names: 675 (1992); Vavilov, Nikolaj Ivanovic (1887-1943) S36. Vegter, H.I., Index Herb. Coll. T-Z: 1076 (1988); Vavilov, Nikolaj Ivanovic (1887-1943) Country Ethiopia Country Eritrea Country Sudan Country Algeria Country Egypt Country Djibouti Country Tunisia Country Morocco http://plants.jstor.org/person/bm000008815 Page 5 of 5.