Background
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was born on November 13, 1887 in Moscow City, Russian Federation. He was born into a merchant family, the older brother of renowned physicist Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov.
1887
Botanist Nikolai Vavilov's mugshot. Note several deep scars on his right cheek, indicating severe beatings sustained by the scientist in prison
(This English translation (by Doris Löve) sees the publica...)
This English translation (by Doris Löve) sees the publication of these seminal papers in their original form, but not original language, for the first time. The structure of the book, with papers arranged in chronological order from 1920 to 1940, provides a unique opportunity to retrace both the development Vavilov's theories on cultivated plants and his gradual creation of a definite terminology.
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biologist geographer Public figure
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was born on November 13, 1887 in Moscow City, Russian Federation. He was born into a merchant family, the older brother of renowned physicist Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov.
Nikolai Ivanovich graduated from the Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1910 with a dissertation on snails as pests.
From 1911 to 1912, he worked at the Bureau for Applied Botany and at the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology. From 1913 to 1914 he travelled in Europe and studied plant immunity, in collaboration with the British biologist William Bateson, who helped establish the science of genetics.
From 1924 to 1935 he was the director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences at Leningrad. Impressed with the work of Canadian phytopathologist Margaret Newton on wheat stem rust, in 1930 he attempted to hire her to work at the institute, offering a good salary and perks such as a camel caravan for her travel. She declined, but visited the institute in 1933 for three months to train 50 students in her research.
Vavilov encountered the young Trofim Lysenko and at the time encouraged him in his work. At the time Lysenko was not the best at growing wheat and peas, but Vavilov continued to support him and his ideas. It was not until later when he was under pressure from the Soviet State that Vavilov began to criticize the non-Mendelian concepts of Lysenko, who won the support of Joseph Stalin.
As a result, Vavilov was arrested on 6 August 1940, while on an expedition to Ukraine. He was sentenced to death in July 1941. In 1942 his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment; he died of starvation in prison in 1943.In 1955, Vavilov's life sentence was pardoned at a hearing of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, undertaken as part of a de-Stalinization effort to review Stalin-era death sentences. By the 1960s his reputation was publicly rehabilitated and he began to be hailed as a hero of Soviet science.
(This English translation (by Doris Löve) sees the publica...)
Agricultural Afghanistan
Breeding as science
Immunity of plants to infectious diseases
Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants
1987Theoretical Foundations of Selection
1987a report of the law of homology series in genetical mutability
(Translated by K. Starr Chester)
1951
All-Russian Central Executive Committee , Russian Federation
1927 - 1929
Central Executive Committee , Russian Federation
1929 - 1935
All-Union Geographical Society
Quotes from others about the person
Charles Siebert: "The son of a Moscow merchant who'd grown up in a poor rural village plagued by recurring crop failures and food rationing, Vavilov was obsessed from an early age with ending famine in both his native Russia and the world."
He had a wife Ekaterina and a son Oleg. After the divorce, he married Elena Barulina and another son Yuri was born.