Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov: Plant Geographer, Geneticist,Martyr of Science

Jules Janick1

Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

Additional index words. centers of origin, centers of diversity, germplasm, plant breeding

Abstract. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887–1943), one of the pioneers of 20th century plant breeding, is best known forseminal work in identifying centers of origins and diversity for cultivated plants. Vavilov studied genetics with WilliamBateson from 1913 to 1914 at the John Innis Horticultural Institute. In 1921, he was chosen by Vladimir Lenin to head theBranch of Applied Botany in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and rose to be the Director of the All-Union Institute of Agriculturein Leningrad, where he oversaw agricultural research for the entire country. By 1934, Vavilov established more than 400research institutes and experiment stations with a staff of 20,000. His efforts established the Soviet Union as a world leaderin genetics and plant breeding in the 1920s and early 1930s. Vavilov carried out an extensive series of expeditions worldwide,including the United States, to collect germplasm; and he created the world’s largest repository, over 250,000 seedaccessions. However, as a result of famine in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, partly as a result of forced collectivization ofpeasants, Vavilov came in conflict with an ambitious agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, who came to prominence with anagricultural technique proposed in 1928, of exposing chilled, soaked seeds of wheat (dubbed vernalization) to extendproduction in northern areas of Russia. Lysenko’s rejection ofMendelian genetics won the support of Joseph Stalin, leadingto the arrest and death sentence of Vavilov, although this was later commuted to 20 years imprisonment. Vavilov died ofstarvation in prison in 1943, thus entering the select group of martyrs of science along with Gordiano Bruno, Galileo Galilei,Antoine Lavoisier, and Georgii Karpechenko.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (Fig. 1) wasone of the foremost innovators of plant im-provement during the first half of the twentiethcentury. His major achievements include theprescient Law of Homologous Variation, theconcept of Centers of Origin for CultivatedPlants, the establishment of germplasm re-positories (genebanks), plant breeding fordisease resistance, and analyses of plantdomestication. He was appointed to Directorof the All-Union Institute of Agriculture inLeningrad and was instrumental in pushingthe emergent SovietUnion to become a globalleader in plant genetics and agricultural re-search in the 1920s and 1930s. His tragicdownfall at the hand of Trofim Lysenko andJoseph Stalin in the late 1930s was a shamefuland terrible chapter in the conflict of scienceand despotism. Vavilov died in prison asa martyr of science. His life and career havebecome an inspiration to botanists, geneti-cists, and agricultural scientists.

EARLY LIFE

Nikolai Vavilov was born in 1887 toa prosperous merchant family in the textilebusiness that had come from the peasant class(Cohen, 1980), He was one of seven children,three of whom died in childhood. Two of his

surviving sisters received amedical education,and his younger brother Sergey IvanovichVavilov (1891–1951) became a distinguishedphysicist known for his work in physicaloptics and luminescence, and as codiscovererof the Vavilov-Cherenkov effect, for whichPavel Cherenkov was awarded a Nobel Prizein 1958. Sergey Vavilov rose to President ofthe USSR Academy of Science, and was therecipient of four Stalin Prizes (1943, 1946,1951, and 1952).

As a boy Nicolai was interested in naturalscience and developed a personal herbarium.He had hoped for a medical career, but as hewas untrained in Latin—a deficiency that hewould later master—he enrolled in MoscowAgricultural Institute (Fig. 2). He studiedplant physiology and bacteriology, and grad-uated in 1911. His BA diploma essay was onsnails as pests, and later studies would earnhim a gold medal of the Moscow Poly-technic Museum. Vavilov continued post-graduate work under the soil scientist DmitriiNicolaevich Prianishnikov, and in 1911 and1912 he taught summer courses at the GolitsynWomen’s Agricultural School, founded byPrianishnikov. From 1911 to 1917, Vavilovfocused on seed selection and breeding withDionazas Leopold’dovich Rudzinskas, inves-tigating plant immunity to disease. In 1911–1912, Vavilov performed practical studies atthe Bureau for Applied Botany and at theBureau of Mycology and Phytopathology ofthe Agricultural Scientific Committee. During1913–14, he continued his education in En-gland in and had fateful interactions withWilliam Bateson of the John Innis Horticul-tural Institution, the first person to use the termgenetics (Fig. 3); Roland Biffen, a geneticistand agricultural botanist at the University ofCambridge; and Sir John Percival, a wheatscientist at the University of Reading. Hevisited the Vilmorin Institute in France, andErnst Haeckel, a pioneer in evolutionary

genetics, in Jena, Germany and returned homeat the outbreak of World War I.

SCIENTIFIC CAREER

In 1917, Vavilov was nominated as Dep-uty Head of the Bureau for Applied Botany.He continued his investigations andwas awardedthe title of Professor of Saratov University in1918. In 1921, he was chosen by Vladimir Leninto head the Branch of Applied Botany inPetrograd (Leningrad in 1924 and SaintPetersburg since 1991) and became the Di-rector of the V.I. Lenin All-Union Institute ofAgriculture in Leningrad, where he adminis-tered agricultural research for the entirecountry. In 1924, the Department of AppliedBotany was retitled the Institute of AppliedBotany and New Crops (VIR since 1930) and

Fig. 1. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, 1887–1943.

Received for publication 3 Feb. 2015. Accepted forpublication 20 Mar. 2015.This paper was presented as part of a Workshopentitled ‘‘Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov: Plant GeneticResources Pioneer and Hero’’ on July 28, 2014 atthe ASHS Annual Conference in Orlando, FL.I thank BarryMendel Cohen, whose doctoral thesisat the University of Texas, Austin was a source formuch of this manuscript as well as Kim Hummerand David Karp who reviewed an early draft, andAnna Whipkey for assistance with the manuscript.1To whom reprint requests should be addressed;e-mail janick@purdue.edu.

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became the central nationwide institutionresponsible for collecting world plant diver-sity and studying it for the purposes of plantbreeding. In 1922, Vavilov headed the Instituteof Experimental Agronomy which in 1930,became the V.I. Lenin All-Union Academyof Agriculture. Vavilov was the first president,serving from 1930 to 1935. From 1930 to 1940,he was director or the Institute of Genetics(Fig. 4) and organized significant nationaland international scientific meetings andcongresses on botany, genetics, plant breed-ing, agricultural economy, and the history ofscience. By 1934, Vavilov established morethan 400 research institutes and experimentstations throughout the Soviet Union, witha total staff of 20,000.

Vavilov’s early scientific work involvedplant immunity to disease, which culminatedin a book, Theory of Immunity of Plants toInfectious Disease (1919) followed by a two-volume work, The Theoretical Basis of PlantSelection. In 1920, Vavilov presented a paperat a conference of plant breeders in Saratoventitled The Law of Homologous Series inHereditary Variability (later published in the1922 Journal of Genetics), one of the majorcontributions on which his worldwide repu-tation is based. He was to be lauded as theMendeleev of Biology! Vavilov listed andarranged plants in a way thatmade prediction ofnew undiscovered forms (missing links) possi-ble. The law held that there is parallel variabilityof homologous or similar characters in taxo-nomically near species. The basis for thesechanges has recently been explained by genesynteny, and this will be discussed in a paper byKeith Folta in the present workshop.

The origin of cultivated plants drew hisattention, and an early work entitled On theOrigin of Cultivated Rye was published in1917, incorporating linguistic analysis. Thiswork presaged Vavilov’s main contributionexpounded in 1926, and published as TheCenters of Origin of Cultivated Plants. Itwas appropriately dedicated to Alphonse DeCandolle, Swiss botanist and early plantgeographer and author of the pre-geneticand pre-cytological classic, The Origin ofCultivated Plants (1880), which predictedthat cultivated plants originated in areasinhabited by their wild relatives. Vavilov laterexpanded his concept in a book entitledTheoretical Basis of Plant Breeding (1935).He noted that the success of breeders such asIvan V. Michurin, Luther Burbank, and NielsHansen were based on their use of exoticgermplasm from distant regions. Eight Cen-ters of Diversity were enumerated: I. China,II. India and Indo-Malaya, III. Central Asia,IV, Near East, V. Mediterranean, VI. Abys-sinia, VII. South Mexico and Central Amer-ica, and VIII, South America (Peru, Ecuador,Bolivia). His centers were refined andregrouped as new findings were made. Vavi-lov was honored for this work with the Leninprize, and named as a foreign member of theRoyal Society of London.

Vavilov and the Centers of Origin will betreated by Kim Hummer and James Hancockin this workshop. In a further work, TheGeographic Principles of the Distribution ofGenes in Cultivated Plants, Vavilov assertedthat the centers of origin would be theprincipal course of dominant traits and thatthe economically important recessive traitswould be found concentrated beyond theboundaries of these centers. Vavilov’swork was expanded by Jack R. Harlan of

the University of Illinois, who critically rede-fined these Centers into Centers and Non-Centers (Harlan, 1971, 1992). The revision isongoing.

Vavilov is considered one of the foremostplant geographers who had the vision toestablish a world collection of seeds embrac-ing all variation. He initiated the concept ofthe genebank, which has become an essentialtool of modern plant conservation and breed-ing. His seed collection grew to 250,000entries by 1940 (Leppik, 1969). Starting with

Fig. 3. Vavilov and William Bateson, 1913.

Fig. 4. Vavilov in Leningrad with map of hisCenters of Origin of cultivated plants, inspira-tion for his global seed bank.

Fig. 2. Young Vavilov wearing student uniform ofthe Petrovaskaya Agricultural Academy, 1909.

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WORKSHOP

his first expedition to Persia in 1916, duringthe First World War, Vavilov made a total of115 research expeditions to 64 countries infive continents to collect diversity. Vavilov’sexpeditions will be covered by Kim Hummerin her papers in this collection. His principalequipment was the mule. In 1932, he col-lected wild sunflower in the United Statesand as a result of this introduction to theSoviet Union, a stable hybrid of sunflowerwas created that was reintroduced to theUnited States in 1972 (Nabhan, 2009). Hislast expedition was made to Soviet-occupiedPoland, when he was arrested by the SovietPolice as a result of the Lysenko Affair, asdiscussed below.

THE LYSKE NO AFFAIR

The rise and fall of Vavilov is a chronicleof fame and shame. Vavilov’s assent inRussian agricultural science was meteoric.His fame was international. He was inductedinto numerous foreign academies and societiesand was awarded an honorary doctorate fromHigher Agricultural School Brno, Czechoslo-vakia in 1936. In 1932, he served as vicepresident of the Sixth International Congressof Genetics, held in Ithaca, New York (Fig. 5).In 1939, he was elected honorary president ofthe Seventh International Congress of Genet-ics, held in Edinburgh, but travel of all Russianscientists was canceled, and he was unable toattend.

His downfall, disgrace, and death wasa direct consequence of his conflict withTrofim Lysenko, which has been referred toas ‘‘The LysenkoAffair’’ (Crow, 1993; Pringle,2009). The origins have multiple threads butthe issue that proved most dangerous was theinterplay of science and politics. The earlyobjection to the new science of genetics(called Mendelism in Russia) was part of aninternational misunderstanding between ge-netics and evolution, a controversy that wasnot fully settled until the pioneering work ofpopulation genetics spearheaded by R.A.Fisher that reconciled evolution with genet-ics. The role of plant selection by the Russianpomologist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin(Fig. 6), a similar persona to Luther Burbankin the United States, created a split betweenfundamental genetics research by scientistsand applied breeding efforts by men who didnot understand genetics, and furthermore haderroneous theories of inheritance. Belief inthe inheritance of acquired characteristicsproposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was tohave an important role when for politicalreasons the concept of changing inheritanceby nurture was considered to have fit com-munist ideology. As a result, modern genetics(Mendelism-Morganism) was considered tobe reactionary, bourgeois, and capitalistic.

At the famous All Russian Genetics Con-gress held in Leningrad in 1929, a paper byTrofim Lysenko (Fig. 7) entitled Concerningthe essence of the winter habit broughtLysenko into prominence. Although whatwas to be dubbed vernalization had beenlong a subject of physiological study in the

19th century, Lysenko initiated the practicalbenefits of this practice by using chilled seedof winter wheat to allow spring planting innorthern areas. He used this as a platform toattack genetics, making the assumption thata quicker environmental change could trans-formwheat, and later erroneously asserted thatthese changes could be inherited. The numberof hectares planted to vernalized wheat in-creased from 43,000 in 1932 to 10 million in1937, but by 1945, this technique was nolonger in use. Lysenko, a dour, mean-spiritedagronomist, advanced his unscientific theorieswith political acumen. Interestingly he wasoriginally supported by the ever-tolerantVavilov, who also brought Michurin intoprominence, but it was to no avail. Lysenkowas also opposed to hybrid maize, and whenhe became President of the Lenin Academyof Agricultural Science in 1938, researchceased.

Lysenko came into prominence andpower when Josef Stalin considered inheri-tance of acquired characters as accepteddogma. This turned out to be the turningpoint to the destruction of Vavilov’s careerand life. In 1935, Vavilov was replaced asPresident of the Academy and the 25thjubilee year of celebration of Vavilov wascanceled. The opposition to Vavilov was tobecome tyrannical, and by 1936 arrests ofgeneticists started to be made, including I.I.Agol and Solomon Grigor’evich Levit. Whenthe Seventh International Congress of Genet-ics was transferred to Edinburgh, Scotland in1939 with Vavilov elected as honorary Chair-man, the entire Soviet delegation includingVavilov was forbidden to attend. WhenLysenko was appointed President of the LeninAcademy on Feb. 18, 1938, the former presi-dents, G.I. Meister and A.I. Muralov, werearrested. Vavilov fought back to no avail. In

Fig. 5. Vavilov with Thomas Hunt Morgan and Nicolay Timofeyev-Ressowsky at the Sixth InternationalGenetics congress in Ithaca, NY.

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1939, at the Leningrad Institute he uttered hisfateful comment: ‘‘We shall go to the pyre, weshall burn, but we shall not retreat from ourconvictions (Pringle, 2009, p. 231).’’

The arrests eventually led to judicialmurder; Gerogii Karpechenko, author of theclassical paper on allopolyploidy (Ryder,1989), was shot in 1941. Vavilov soon re-alized his opponent was not Lysenko butStalin. The beginning of the end came in1940, after a vitriolic private exchange withLysenko. Vavilov continued working andcompleted his late work World Varietal Re-sources of Grain Crops. In that year, asa consequence of the Molotov-RibbentropPact and the occupation of part of Poland bythe Soviet Union, Vavilov headed a smallexpedition to study economic and wild plantsin Eastern Poland (Western Ukraine). Duringthis expedition, a car approached andVavilovwas unceremoniously taken back to back

to Moscow under custody. A letter fromthe NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, head ofthe infamous NKVD, to Molotov was laterfound, requesting permission for the arrest.Vavilov was charged with belonging toa rightist conspiracy and spying for England.Confessions were obtained under torture butlater denied. He was convicted as chargedand sentenced to death. The sentence wascommuted to 20 years imprisonment, perhapsdue to the intervention by Prianishnikov, hisaging professor, who had a student who wasthe wife of Beria.

Vavilov was evacuated to Saratov in 1941(Fig. 8).His lifewas to cease in the citywhere hisstar had once risen. He died in prison on 26 Jan.1943, of cardiovascular failure and dystro-phy at the age of 55—undernourished and

sick as a result of solitary confinement(Fig. 9). He was to become a nonperson,and his name was never mentioned until hissubsequent rehabilitation in the 1960s. In1948, Lysenko in the infamous August ses-sion of the Lenin Academy of AgriculturalSciences gave his hand away when he pro-claimed that the Central Committee of theCommunist Party had approved his speechThe Situation in Biological Science.‘‘Michurinist biology’’ was proclaimed thecorrect path and ‘‘reactionary Mendelism-Morganism’’ was considered heresy and error.The role of Stalin in determining biologicorthodoxy became a frightening aspect ofdespotism, equivalent to the worst example ofthe Inquisition in which the heliocentric modelof Galileo was proclaimed apostasy, and those

Fig. 7. Trophim Lysenko, 1898–1976.

Fig. 8. Mug shot of Vavilov after arrest in 1940.

Fig. 6. Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, 1855–1948.

Fig. 9. Saratov prison and cell of Vavilov where he died in 1943 of cardio vascular failure and dystrophy atthe age of 55, undernourished and sick as a result of solitary confinement.

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who adhered to it were to be burned unless theyretracted.

EPILOGUE

Nicolai Vavilovwas an extremely attractiveman, well read, likeable, and tolerant, with anengaging personality. Exuberantly energetic,a tireless worker with a photographic memory,multilingual, and brilliant, he learned locallanguages and embraced farmers. He wasinternationally known and respected by ge-neticists and plant breeders. His scientific

work was extraordinarily productive. Hepublished widely and as a man of actionwas able to carry out a tremendously pro-ductive program of experimental stations,collections, and research stations. However,Vavilov had the misfortune of coming intothe crosshairs of despotism and was ruth-lessly destroyed. His work turned out to behis heritage, and his stature has increasedover time, while his opponents, as Torque-mada, will be only remembered in infamy.

The memory of Vavilov had been pre-served by his followers, who gathered up and

preserved manuscripts, documents, and pic-tures. After Vavilov’s official rehabilitation(Fig. 10) after the death of Stalin, hundreds ofbooks and articles devoted to his life andscientific accomplishments were published.Memorial displays have been opened inMoscow, Saint Petersburg, Saratov, andPoltava. The name of Vavilov is now carriedby the Russian Society of Geneticists andBreeders, the Institute of General Genetics ofthe Academy of Sciences, the Institute ofPlant Industry, and the Saratov AgriculturalInstitute. The enduring legacy of Vavilovcontinues to exist and inspire humanitythrough the global gene banks now estab-lished through the United Nations and withinsovereign countries.

Literature Cited

Cohen, B.M. 1980. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov: Hislife and work. Ph.D dissertation. University ofTexas, Austin.

Crow, J.F. 1993. N.I. Vavilov, martyr to genetictruth. Genetics 134:1–4.

Harlan, J.S. 1971. Agricultural origins, centers andnoncenters. Science 174:468–474.

Harlan, J.S. 1992. Crops & man. 2nd ed. ASA,CSA, Madison, WI.

Leppik, E.E. 1969. Life and works of N.I. Vavilov.Econ. Bot. 23(2):128–132.

Nabhan, G.P. 2009. Where our food comes from:tracing Nikolay Vavilov’s quest to end famine.Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Pringle, P. 2009. The murder of Nikolai Vavilov:the story of Stalin’s persecution of one of thetwentieth century’s greatest scientists. JRbooks, London.

Ryder, E.J. 1989. G. D. Karpechenko (1928) poly-ploid hybrids of Raphanus sativus L. · Bras-sica oleracea l, p. 437–525. In: J. Janick (ed.).Classical papers in horticultural science. Pren-tice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Fig. 10. Vavilov honored in Russian postage stamps after his posthumous official rehabilitation in theSoviet Union.

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