Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov

Russian geneticist

• Born: November 26, 1887
• Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
• Died: January 26, 1943
• Place of death: Saratov, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Vavilov is noted for his pioneering work on the origins, distribution, and genetics of crop plants. He postulated a law of homologous series in variation whereby variation (and thus characteristics of possible cultivars) of a plant could be predicted from variation in related species. He also mapped centers of origin and genetic diversity of cultivated plants on a worldwide scale as well as personally organizing and leading numerous botanical expeditions and establishing a network of agricultural experiment stations in the Soviet Union.

Early Life

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (nyihk-eh-LI ee-VAHN-ehv-yihch vehv-YEE-lehf) was born in Moscow, the eldest child of Ivan Vavilov, a prominent Moscow merchant. The Vavilovs were able to provide an excellent education for all three of their surviving children. Vavilov entered the Petrovsko Agricultural Institute (later the Timiraezev Academy) in Moscow in 1906, studying soils and plant chemistry. When he was graduated in 1910 his dissertation received an award from the Bogdanov Museum in Moscow.

After graduation Vavilov worked as an assistant at the Poltava Experiment Station, studying the immunity of plants to parasitic fungi and anatomical variation in grasses, subjects that were to continue to interest him throughout much of his professional career. In 1911, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he worked with the noted botanists R. E. Regel and A. A. Yachevsky, studying immunity and variability in plants. These men arranged for him to study in biological laboratories in continental Europe and in England, where in 1913-1914 he studied with Great Britain’s pioneer geneticist William Bateson and Rowland Biffen, a noted cereal breeder.

In the early years of the twentieth century, botany was in the process of transition from a predominantly field-and-taxonomy-oriented discipline to a more experimental and laboratory-oriented science. Vavilov, who received an excellent education in both approaches, combined them successfully throughout his career. He returned to Russia in 1914, where he completed his M.S. dissertation. In 1917, he was appointed professor of genetics, plant breeding, and agronomy at the Agricultural Institute of Voronezh in central Russia and at the University of Saratov on the Volga. In these early years of the Soviet era, his legendary energy and devotion to agricultural science enabled him to carry on an ambitious program of research into the systematics and breeding of crop plants, despite the disruptions of revolution and civil war. In 1920, he organized a congress of plant breeders in Saratov, at which he presented his classic paper on the law of homologous series in variation, which was also presented at the International Agricultural Congress in the United States the following year and received immediate international acclaim. Some measure of Vavilov’s zeal and vision can be deduced from the fact that the 1920 Saratov congress took place in a region devastated by famine and civil war, despite an almost complete breakdown of modern transport, while Vavilov was forming the groundwork for crop-breeding programs as ambitious as any being contemplated in the United States and Western Europe. Vavilov married Elena Ivanovna Barulina, a fellow plant scientist, and the couple had two sons.

Life’s Work

In 1920, Vavilov was appointed to succeed Regel as chair of the Department of Economic Botany and Plant Breeding in the Agricultural Institute of Petrograd. He held this appointment until the institute was reorganized in 1924 as the All-Union Institute of Economic Botany and New Cultures, with Vavilov as its head. In 1966, following Vavilov’s rehabilitation, it was named the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry.

Vavilov had a utopian vision of the transformation of Russian agriculture through plant breeding. His sweeping revolutionary views attracted favorable attention from Vladimir Ilich Lenin, which enabled him to establish a rapport with the Bolshevik hierarchy and obtain scarce funds for agricultural research. With energetic leadership and the full support of the government, agricultural research in Russia grew at a rapid pace. The number of research stations doubled from 1914 to 1929, and the number of trained specialists tripled. Vavilov undertook numerous expeditions to many parts of the world, including Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Mediterranean area, Italy, Ethiopia, China, Japan, Mexico, Central America, and South America to collect stocks of cultivated plants and their wild relatives. These collections, grown in field plots and maintained as viable seed in various parts of the Soviet Union, provided a rich gene bank from which to draw useful characteristics for plant-breeding programs. Unfortunately, they were not well maintained following Vavilov’s death, and many irreplaceable strains have been lost.

Vavilov drew on his experience as a field botanist and his work in plant breeding to propose two important principles of economic botany: the law of homologous series in variation and the definition of centers of origin of cultivated plants. The law of homologous series states that a variation found in one species is likely to be found in related species. Vavilov based his principle on observation of thousands of cultivars of grasses and legumes, species of wild plants, and even fungi. It is not a law in the sense of a physical principle (such as the laws of gravity), but it accurately summarized observations and provided a framework for systematic plant breeding.

Vavilov’s main work on the centers of crop-plant origin and diversity was unpublished during his lifetime but has since been reconstructed from manuscripts by P. M. Zhukovsky, a younger colleague. He mapped eight (later increased to twelve) macrocenters of crop-plant origin, which in general coincide with the present areas of highest diversity of cultivars and the distributions of wild forebears, both important sources for useful genes, especially for resistance to diseases and pests. Vavilov was honored at home and abroad for his contributions to agricultural science. In 1923, he was elected corresponding member, and in 1929 a full member, of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences and was director of its Institute of Genetics. He received the Lenin Prize for his work on plant-immunity breeding in 1926. Although not a Communist, he was a member of the Soviet Central Executive Committee. He participated in International Agricultural Congresses in the United States in 1922 and 1929, and in the International Genetics Conference in Ithaca, New York, in 1932.

As the foremost Russian geneticist of his day and a prominent figure in science and politics, Vavilov became involved with the scientific demagogue Trofim Denisovich Lysenko in a bitter controversy that ultimately destroyed both Vavilov and genetics in the Soviet Union. Ironically, Lysenko was aided in his early career by the growth of agricultural science under Vavilov’s direction. Although he had some success in practical agricultural research, which gave him a certain plausibility, Lysenko was intellectually unable to master theoretical genetics. Instead, he became convinced that he had demonstrated inheritance of acquired characteristics (Lamarckian as opposed to Mendelian genetics), a position that was appealing to the new Soviet leadership under Joseph Stalin for a number of reasons. First, it promised a quicker route to producing improved varieties than laborious crossing experiments. Second, especially as applied to human genetics, inheritance of acquired characteristics was more palatable to Marxists than a doctrine teaching that one cannot by one’s own actions change an offspring’s genetic inheritance, which as a corollary admits at least the theoretical possibility that there are inherently genetically inferior classes or races of people. Finally, forced collectivization had been a disaster for Russian agriculture, and agricultural science provided a convenient scapegoat. At first, Vavilov attempted to compromise with Lysenko but found himself pushed into an increasingly untenable position. In 1935, he was dropped from the Central Executive Committee and in 1936 relieved of his duties as president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. An offer to chair the International Genetics Conference in Edinburgh in 1939 had to be declined, because he was no longer able to travel abroad, and a proposed International Genetics Congress in the Soviet Union in 1940 was abruptly and inexplicably dropped in the planning stages.

The stronger his enemies became, the harder he fought. In 1936, his criticism of Lysenkoism was mild; in 1939, he denounced it as ignorant and irrational. Finally, on August 6, 1940, while on a collecting trip in Moldavia, Vavilov was arrested as an enemy of the people. The charges against him consisted of fictitious allegations of sabotage and espionage in agricultural institutes, brought under duress by a subordinate who was himself in prison, plus a somewhat subtler charge of fascism based on association of Mendelian genetics with notions of racial superiority, a doctrine never espoused by Vavilov. He was interrogated in Moscow, then transferred to a prison in Saratov, on the Volga River, where he died of “dystrophy and edematous disease,” according to the official death certificate, on January 26, 1943. Conflicting information appears in the literature regarding the date, place, and circumstances of his death, which only became known in the West after World War II. Mark Popovsky suggests that he may have been murdered at some earlier date when the Germans threatened Saratov, but the witnesses he quotes tend to support the official story. The hunger, cold, and brutality endemic in Soviet prisons at the time undoubtedly hastened the death of a vigorous, athletic man, who was only fifty-five years old.

Significance

To his contemporaries, Vavilov was a charismatic man, who seemed almost superhuman in his energies, persuasive, capable of inspiring loyalty, and capable, some might say, of working a miracle such as pulling Russian agriculture out of the dark ages into the twentieth century. He failed, not through an inappropriate approach or through lack of effort but through being unable to judge accurately the evolving political climate in which he worked. In retrospect, Vavilov’s accomplishments as a geneticist are solid and were very influential in the period between the wars, although modern crop science looks to other models and his predictions about the future of genetics contained too much guesswork to be considered prophetic. It is a great misfortune that the collections he so laboriously built up did not survive intact and that the system of agricultural research he helped so much to foster was crippled by two decades of charlatanism.

In the end, then, it may well be in the unsought role of the most prominent martyr for science that Vavilov is longest remembered. His fate serves as a reminder that science and government are inextricably interconnected and that even in the twentieth century the rational can be overcome by the irrational in a scientific discipline when the wrong people are called on to be judges.

Bibliography

Bakhteev, F. T. “To the History of Russian Science: Academician Nicholas Ivan Vavilov on His Seventieth Anniversary, November 26, 1887-August 2, 1942.” Quarterly Review of Biology 35: 115-119. A testimonial biography of a type commonly published in Soviet scientific journals on significant anniversaries in the life of prominent scientists. This article coincides with efforts to rehabilitate Vavilov in Russia. It emphasizes the international character of his work and the respect with which Vavilov was regarded abroad and details his position and the honors he received.

Mangelsdorf, Paul C. “Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov.” Genetics 38, no. 1 (1953): 1-4. A belated obituary and testimonial in the leading American genetics journal. Vavilov’s contributions to genetics are clearly summarized. Vavilov is characterized as Russia’s most distinguished geneticist, and the writer comments on the irony that the free world was reaping substantial benefits from the work that the Soviet Union disdained.

Medvedev, Zhores A. Soviet Science. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Medvedev concentrates his attention on the failures of Soviet science and conditions in the Soviet system that discourage scientific innovation. A considerable portion of the book is devoted to the flowering of genetics in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s and its subsequent stifling under the influence of Lysenko. In Russia, Medvedev was among those responsible for defending and rehabilitating Vavilov; he subsequently emigrated to the United States.

Popovsky, Mark. Manipulated Science: The Crisis of Science and Scientists in the Soviet Union Today. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Popovsky, a Russian specialist in scientific journalism who emigrated to the United States, presents a historical overview of the practice of science in the Soviet Union. The emphasis is on failures and weaknesses of the system and the dismal record of natural sciences under Stalin. An admirer of Vavilov, he devotes considerable space to the conflict between Vavilov and Lysenko and Vavilov’s imprisonment.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Vavilov Affair. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Archon, 1984. The first two chapters of this book summarize Vavilov’s contributions to genetics; the remainder is devoted to the conflict with Lysenko and Vavilov’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment. Included are summaries of interviews with contemporaries and commentary on the position of scientists under a totalitarian regime.

Pringle, Peter. Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto The Promise and Perils of the Biotech Harvest. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. This book about genetically created foods includes discussion of Vavilov’s experiments with crop plants.

Zirkle, Conway, ed. Death of a Science in Russia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949. The conflict between Mendelian geneticists and Lysenko and his followers, who espoused a form of Lamarckianism, is documented chronologically in a series of excerpts from the Soviet press, interspersed with interpretive chapters by American scientists. The introductory chapter gives a clear explanation of the background of the controversy, the differences between the two views of inheritance, and factors in the Soviet Union that encouraged Lysenko.