Nikolai Vavilov: The Father of Genebanks

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was born on 25 November 1887 in Moscow, into a family of prosperous merchants in the textile industry. One of seven children, Vavilov had a younger brother, Sergei, who became a distinguished physicist for his work on optics and luminescence and was president of the USSR Academy of Sciences under Stalin.

As a boy, Vavilov was interested in natural science and had his own herbarium. He studied plant physiology and pathology – with a focus on snails as pests – at the Moscow Agricultural Institute before conducting postgraduate work under the soil scientist Dmitri Prianishnikov. 

Vavilov began to work on selecting seeds for their resistance to disease in 1911 and continued his studies in England two years later at the John Innes Horticultural Institution (now the John Innes Centre). There, he worked with William Bateson, who coined the term “genetics” to describe the study of inheritance. Bateson also promoted the ideas of the German-Czech botanist Gregor Mendel, who proposed that some traits are passed on unchanged from generation to generation.

Revolutionary Botanist

In 1917, the year of the Russian Revolutions, Vavilov was appointed deputy head of the Bureau for Applied Botany, which later became Russia’s central institution responsible for the collection and conservation of global plant diversity. It is known today as the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR).

Vavilov was given increasing responsibility for overseeing the country’s agricultural research under Lenin and continued to establish the Soviet Union as a world leader in genetics and plant breeding after the Soviet leader’s death in 1924. He set up hundreds of research institutes and experiment stations across the huge country, building a staff that numbered more than 20,000.

Vavilov's notebooks at the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR) in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Photo: Luigi Guarino

His fabled collecting expeditions began in 1916 in northern Iran and the Pamirs, and he returned to Russia with previously unknown varieties of wheat and rye. He continued to travel until 1933, making trips to the United States, China, the Latin American and Mediterranean countries, and Ethiopia.

Vavilov amassed more than 250,000 seed samples in his genebank, which became the world’s largest repository of crop diversity under his leadership. In World War II, the collection acquired legendary status during the 900-day siege of Leningrad, when the institute’s staff refused to eat the seeds even as they starved to death.

Political Nemesis

Vavilov’s lifelong mission to feed the nation through crop diversity began to unravel after Stalin’s forced collectivization program led to mass famine. In search of a solution, the Soviet leader endorsed the now discredited pseudo-scientific ideas of agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who undermined Vavilov’s position by attacking his Mendelian approach as bourgeois.

“We shall go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions,” Vavilov famously said. 

He was arrested in 1940 during a collecting expedition in western Ukraine and was formally accused of being a traitor and a British spy. His death sentence was later commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment. 

Vavilov died in incarceration in Saratov on 26 January 1943. The cause of death was starvation: a bitter irony for one of the most prominent champions of food security in the 20^th century.