The Soviet botanist who wanted to feed the world and died of hunger

Nikolai Vavilov was pardoned in 1955, but he never knew it. Fifteen years ago, while he was collecting seeds in the Ukrainian fields, the Soviet secret police had taken him without explanation.

Vavílov, one of the world's most admired biologists and one of the leading pioneers in the field of plant breeding and genetics, has disappeared without a trace.

Nobody knew that he had been arrested for espionage, sabotage and destruction, nor sentenced to death following a secret trial held in 1941, a sentence that had been commuted for 20 years in a gulag.

Documents released later showed that prior to the rigged trial, the police, in search of confessions, had submitted 1,700 hours of brutal interrogations over 400 sessions, according to the expert. in plant taxonomy, Geoffrey Hall.

Neither his wife nor his son nor his colleagues learned that while the USSR was fighting against the Nazis, the conditions in the gulag deteriorated so much that after trying to survive by eating frozen cabbage and moldy flour, Vavilov died of starvation. January 26, 1943.

But finally everything was known.

And those who learn the story of Vavilov can not ignore the bitter irony that the man who has devoted his whole life to ending famines in the world is starving.

But for many researchers, the tragic life of this soviet is a lesson on how politics can pervert scientific development and curb technological progress.

Not hungry any more

Vavilov was born in 1887 in Moscow. At that time, Russia already had a long history of famines caused by droughts or catastrophic weather events that killed millions of people.

In fact, during his 56 years of life, he lived several times, although the causes of the last of them are not natural, but political.

In the imperial Russia of his youth, under the autocratic regime of the Tsars, crop losses were frequent.

Seeing the suffering caused by the lack of food convinced him that it was imperative to do something so that it would never happen anywhere else in the world.

Thus, when he studied, he will focus on the emerging scientific disciplines of botany and genetics.

The big plan

The idea of ​​the Soviet was to grow plants capable of withstanding adverse conditions.

For this, he planned scientific expeditions to collect seeds of crop varieties and their wild ancestors.

It began in "areas where agriculture has been practiced for a long time and in which indigenous civilizations have sprung up," says ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhan, author of "Where does our food come from?" : in the footsteps of Nikolai Vavilov's mission to end hunger

Because?

Because Vavilov was one of the first scientists to recognize the importance of genetic diversity.

Then we had to go back to the places where humanity started to domesticate the plants in order to save them.

For millennia, farmers had selected high yielding and tasteful species.

During this process, genes conferring useful properties, such as resistance to disease and sudden changes in climate, have been lost.

The result: better quality foods but less resilient crops, a feature that has cost many lives throughout its history.

Then, the only way to restore lost genes to plants was to find their wild ancestors and take advantage of their genetic heritage.

Pioneer

At a time when the words "genes" and "genetics" had just begun, Vavilov developed his plan on the basis of Mendel's laws.

This placed him at the forefront of scientific thought at the time. And that did not go unnoticed.

In the first years after the revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin understood the economic power of Vavilov's dream and supported it in his expeditions, thinking that it would make the USSR a leader in world food production.

The scientist has launched a plant exploration program on every continent.

In total, he organized (and frequently led) 115 expeditions in 64 countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Taiwan, Korea, Spain, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Mexico and the United States.

He then became Director of the Office of Applied Botany and Chairman of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union, which made available a large number of experimental stations.

Under his command, he had about 25,000 people scattered throughout the USSR.

In an old Tsarist palace in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg), he created one of the first seed banks in the world and the largest of his time.

Bourgeois heritage

Vavilov, from a family of merchants, spoke 15 languages ​​and was immensely popular and prosperous.

He had supreme confidence in his knowledge and was a talented and stubborn defender of his principles.

In addition, he valued the integration of scientific ideas from around the world, kept in contact with counterparts in many places and integrated the work of non-Russian scientists in his work, especially those of the Austrian. Gregor Mendel and the British Charles Darwin.

But in the USSR led by the Stalinists, scientists affiliated with people outside the country were seen as possible conspirators against the government.

In addition, Joseph Stalin, Lenin's successor, had no patience for long-term strategies such as the global food security plan that Vavilov had in mind.

On the other hand, Stalin and his comrades found it too bourgeois that plants could inherit and transfer genes.

But opposing a personality of Vavilov's stature was not easy … until a famine and a scientific alternative were combined.

The sworn enemy

Years before, Vavilov had invited a young Ukrainian peasant "who was still covered in mud" to work with him as a young field badistant.

He called Trofim Lysenko.

Vavilov was so impressed by the diligence and enthusiasm of Lysenko that he appointed him to the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1934.

What Vavilov did not know was that Lysenko had a deep resentment and was just waiting for the opportunity to harm him.

Starvation

The last famine witnessed by Vavilov is largely due to the collectivization of private farms by Stalin, who turned them into an online production system and greatly reduced yields.

Stalin needed a scapegoat for the famine and failure of his collectivization of farms and Vavilov was the ideal candidate.

It gave him three years to produce varieties resistant to everything, even if Vavilov had made it clear that, scientifically, this could not be achieved before 10 or 12 years.

In parallel, Lysenko launched his attack with the powerful support of the ruling body of the USSR.

Theoretical duel

The ideology of Lysenko is now considered a pseudoscience.

It was based mainly on the rejection of Mendelian genetics and all that underpinned the science of Vavilov.

Lysenko and his colleagues Lamarckians (followers of the demystified biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) were known as "progressive biologists" and argued that the inherited traits could only be changed by changing the external conditions in which lived a plant or an animal.

They badured, for example, that maize would soon grow in the far north of the country.

None of this has been substantiated by scientific evidence.

Discussions between genetics supporters and Lamarckians took place both in the press and at special meetings, during which Vavilov was the keynote speaker and attempted to present scientific arguments to counter declarations without foundation of Lysenko.

But everything was in vain.

In a few years, Vavilov (whom Lysenko described as "reactionary, bourgeois, idealist and formalist") was isolated politically and academically.

He was no longer allowed to lead Soviet delegations to international plant genetics forums, while his shipments were considerably reduced and restricted to "out-of-the-box" locations, such as Crimea and Ljubljana. Ukraine.

His professional integrity was affected by an avalanche of political attacks and his academic privileges were removed.

Finally, one day in 1940, a secret police car arrived and took it away.

Protect the treasure with their lives

While Vavilov was missing, his seed collection was in danger.

Adolf Hitler had urged his forces to besiege Leningrad and let the people die of starvation and cold.

The site lasted nearly 900 days: from September 1941 to January 1944.

Faced with the threat that the collection of some 370,000 seeds, fruits and roots stored in a secret chamber falls into the hands of the Nazis, the starving population or rats, Vavilov's team formed a militia.

Some 700,000 people died of starvation during the three-year siege, including several Vavilov colleagues who barricaded themselves with the hidden collection and managed to protect her, even at the cost of their own lives, that they could have save by eating some of what they were. keeping.

"Saving these seeds for future generations and helping the world recover after the war was more important than the comfort of a person," said one of them, according to Nabhan.

The resurrection

In 1948, the Lenin Academy announced that lyssenkoism should be taught as the only correct theory, and this, until the mid-1960s.

And although much of his work has been lost, Vavilov's legacy is more present than ever.

Its seed bank in St. Petersburg is now called "Botanical Garden and Research Institute Panruso N.I. Vavilov". Although suffering from deprivation, 12 of its scattered satellite search stations still operate in different climatic regions of Russia.

In addition, its clbadification of "centers of origin" (areas where the domestication process of a species has started and where wild relatives are at the origin of this culture) is considered to be the One of the most complete and, with some modifications, it is still valid. .

According to Nahab, his legacy is even greater.

"All of our notions about biodiversity and the need for diversity in our dishes to keep us healthy have come from their work."