[History of Agriculture] The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a pioneer in plant breeding and genetics, but he also was a whole lot more than that.

At the time, this is in the early 1900s, the field of genetics was really just newly formed and not yet widely accepted.

But he saw potential to collect plant species and varieties from all over the world and bring them back to his home country of Russia, which desperately needed a solution to food shortages and mass starvation.

As you could probably tell from the title of the book, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, the story does not have a happy ending.

It is both a incredible story of contributions to agricultural innovation, but a cautionary tale of what happens when science is seen as a threat to an ideology instead of as a potential solution.

As with every story that I have covered for the history of ag innovation, the insights and lessons I think are as relevant today as they were when the story was transpiring.

To quote the book here to start, Nikolai Ivanovich's extraordinary life would end in 1943, not in the cities where he made his reputation as one of the great scientists of the 20th century, not in Moscow or Leningrad or any of the distant places on five continents where he had risked his life for samples of rare food plants.

In the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, sorry if I mispronounced that, the high plateaus of Abyssinia, the Andes of Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, he would die of starvation in Saratov in a field prison on the edge of the rich black earth of the steppe.

It was here that he planned to use his new plant varieties to end the ghastly cycle of Russian famines and turn them into crops that would feed the world.

Again, we're covering Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov today in the book that I'm basing this off of is Peter Pringle's The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov.

We'll start back, though, at the beginning of his career and go through what led to this tragic end to his life, what it means for agriculture, and then, of course, those insights that can help how we view science and innovation today.

For some context here, Vavilov, who pursued his education in the early 1900s, fell in love with genetics at a time when the field was still very new.

Most of you know the story of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel.

and his discovery of genetics in his pea breeding experiments and that was like in the mid-1800s i want to say like 1860-ish what is less known or at least i didn't really realize is that his notes and discoveries went largely unnoticed for over 40 years until they were brought to light by a couple of scientists closer to 1900 which is just Crazy.

So you've got, you know, this mind blowing discovery that goes for decades before really becoming kind of mainstream in scientific communities.

And that was only what, 125 or so years ago that the scientific community realized genes, genetics existed.

And like any breakthrough, while it was acknowledged and adopted by the majority of scientists, it wasn't widely understood or accepted by everyone.

And that is part of the fundamental tension here in the story of Vavilov.