Nikolai Vavilov
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Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (Николай Иванович Вавилов, November 25/(November 13), 1887— January 26 1943) was a prominent Russian botanist and geneticist best known for having identified the centres of origin of cultivated plants.
He was born into a merchant family in Moscow. Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov was his brother.
After graduating from the Moscow Agricultural Institute, he worked at the Bureau for Applied Botany and at the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology during the years 1911-1912. After this, in 1913-1914 he travelled to Europe and studied plant immunity, in collaboration with Professor William Bateson, who founded the science of genetics.¹
He organized a series of botanical-agromomic expeditions all over the world in the development of his theory about centers of origin of cultivated plants and created the largest collection of plant seeds in the world (which was diligently preserved even throughout the Siege of Leningrad). He formulated the law of homologous series in variation. ([link])
He was a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, President of All-Union Geographical Society and a recipient of the Lenin Prize.
In 1940 he was repressed as a defender of "bourgeois pseudoscience" genetics in struggle with Lysenkoism and died of malnutrition in prison in 1943. Ironically, most of his work and samples were collected by Heinz Brücher, an SS officer who was also a plant genetics expert.
The standard botanical author abbreviation Vavilov is applied to species he described.
Timeline
- 1887 - born November 25, in Moscow.
- 1911 - graduated from the Moscow Agricultural Institute.
- 1917-1921 - professor of the agronomy department of the Saratov University.
- 1919 - theory of the immunity for plants.
- 1920 - formulation of the law of homology series in genetical mutability.
- 1921(-1940) - chairman of the applied botanics and selection section in Petrograd, which in 1924 was reorganized into the All-Union Institute of Applied Botanics and New Crops and in 1930, into the All-Union Institute of Plant Cultivation, with Vavilov being director until August, 1940.
- 1926 - Lenin Award.
- 1930—1940 - head of the genetics laboratory in Moscow, later reorganized into the Institute of Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
- 1931—1940 - President of the All-Union Geographical Society.
- 1940 - arrested.
- 1943 - died imprisoned and suffering from dystrophia (faulty nutrition of muscles, leading to paralysis), in the Saratov prison.
Works
- Земледельческий Афганистан. (1929) (Agricultural Afghanistan)
- Селекция как наука. (1934) (Selection as science)
- Закон гомологических рядов в наследственной изменчивости. (1935) (The law of homology series in genetical mutability)
- Учение о происхождении культурных растений после Дарвина. (1940) (The theory of origins of cultivated plants after Darwin)
Works in English
- The Origin, Variation, Immunity and Breeding of Cultivated Plants (translated by K. Starr Chester). 1951. Chronica Botanica 13:1–366
- Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants (translated by Doris Love). 1992. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0521404274
- Five Continents (translated by Doris Love). 1997. IPGRI, Rome; VIR, St. Petersburg ISBN 9290433027
External link
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