August 10, 2011 • 21 mins
Nikolai Vavilov traveled to 64 countries gathering seeds and plants and established the first seed bank. Stalin had the botanist sentenced to death, but his seed bank endured: Other scientists guarded the stores from rats, starving Russians and the Nazis.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Debline and Chocolate Boarding and Deblina.
Last week I took a vacation. I went to a
wedding in Indiana, and I was also in Kentucky for
(00:22):
a little bit too, so I was in corn country,
kind of one of the prime areas of corn country,
and I did see a lot of corn on my drive.
I would just drive down the highway, see corn on
both sides. Um I noticed some growing right up to
an Arby's, like literally right up to the parking lot,
which I thought was kind of funny. And as soon
(00:44):
as I got home, I picked up my July National
Geographic and I noticed an article that sort of sparked
my interest, possibly because I had just seen all this corn,
but it was an article on agriculture by Charles Siebert,
and it was specific on seed banks. And I know
you're kind of a fan of seed banks, or you're
(01:05):
interested in them, at least I am, And I have
no idea why, considering that I'm not interested in saving
apparently in any other aspect of my life. But before
we go any further, let's talk about seed banks a
little bit for those who don't know what they are.
The basic idea behind seed banks is that they are
backup copies of our agricultural history. So as we've turned
more and more toward monoculture crops and high yield strains
(01:28):
since the Green Revolution of the nineteen forties, we've boosted
production and prevented an estimated one billion people from starving.
But we've also abandoned a lot of the diversity that
made that specialized breeding possible in the first place. If
the world's top wheat varieties, for instance, were suddenly struck
by a blight, the resistance to fight that blight might
(01:51):
unfortunately be found in some old variety or some wild
variety that we have already lost. So the seed bank
is basically just an insurance policy, a way to preserve
the wild species and to preserve those ancient, domesticated varieties
of crops that aren't widely grown anymore. Because people are
growing certain high yield varieties, you know, we keep them
(02:13):
around just in case. And as I learned in this
National Geographic article, though, the seed bank for the long
term preservation as opposed to just for next year's crop
is a pretty new idea, one that came about in
the nineteen twenties nineteen thirties in Russia, and it was
the idea of a botanist named Nikolai Vavilov, who is
sometimes called the Indiana Jones of botany. So that's our
(02:36):
little hook there to get you into this one, because
he did really take part in some interesting, adventurous world
travels in pursuit of his seed collections. Yeah, but as
we'll see, seed banks and the genetic principles that guide
them could be pretty controversial topics. People died for their
scientific beliefs in the story that we're about to tell you,
(02:58):
and scientists starved other than eat their stores of seeds.
It's something for This is something for everyone podcast. I
would say genetics world issues like famine and commercial agriculture,
plus a healthy dose of World War two era intrigue.
But technically it all starts in a peaceful monastery in Austria. Yeah,
so we're gonna rewind a little bit to biology. One
(03:20):
oh one. Most of us today know Gregor Mendel is
the father of genetics, but during his lifetime he was
among a well educated monk who had a penchant for
breeding peas and studying their inherited traits. I swear I
can still see the little illustration in my biology textbook
of the peas and how they're crossed, and the photo
(03:41):
of Gregor Mendel next to it. But after Mendel's death
in eighteen eighty four, his revolutionary work was largely forgotten
until nineteen hundred when a guy named William Bateson, who
is considered the father of the science of genetics, popularized
Mendelian genetics of the University of Cambridge, and he wrote
(04:02):
the first genetics textbook on it, and within a few
years it was it was the new dominant theory in genetics.
And one of bates AND's students was young and Nikolai Babolov,
who we mentioned earlier, and he had been born in
Moscow in eighteen eighties seven to a wealthy merchant family.
Before studying with Bateson, Vavilov had graduated from a Russian
(04:22):
agricultural academy, one of the many that were established after
a terrible famine of eighteen ninety two, and famine is
going to prove to be a major theme here. So
just keep going mind for the past. Yes. After learning
about genetics and the new scientific possibilities to botany, Vavilov
decided that he'd devote himself to helping the poor, finding
and breeding strains of crops that could grow in all
(04:44):
parts of Russia, eliminating the possibility of famine. Yeah, and
he really he did that quite successfully, had a good career.
After school. He went to work as a professor, and
soon he rose to be deputy head of the Bureau
for Applied Botany. His career under Lenin ESPEC sally thrived,
and other positions followed. He became the head of the
Department of Applied Botany at Saratov University, the head of
(05:06):
the Institute of Experimental Agronomy UM, and later it's president
at the v I. Lenin All Union Academy. A lot
of words here, a lot of institutes and academies, but
just to give you a sense of how successful he was.
Eventually he even became the director of the Institute of Genetics.
But all the while he did have that motivating force
(05:27):
of of preventing famine, helping Russia develop strains of crops
that that could grow all over the country. Which obviously
has a very diverse climate. But he knew that to
breed better seeds, he'd have to have lots and lots
and lots of genes to work with to get those
desirable traits that he needed, things like cold resistance, drought resistance,
(05:50):
pests and resistance whatever you're you're trying to imbue in
the plant you're creating. And he knew that he'd need
not just the wild relatives of common crops, but the
ancient domesticated varieties to which are called land acres. So,
just to give a further example of my Indiana corn situation,
not the corn that's growing on your Indiana farm, but
(06:12):
the corn that metho Americans would have domesticated thousands of
years ago, as well as that domesticated corns wild ancestors.
So really every potential avenue for genetic success you could imagine. Yeah,
so that sounds like a pretty daunting task or goal,
but he so he started seriously collecting. In nineteen sixteen
on a trip to Iran Russian soldier station. There, we're
(06:35):
getting sick from some mysterious ailment, and Fabolov determined that
the wheat fields their bread was made from also contained
poisonous weeds and plants with fungal infection, so he solved
that problem there. But he also came home with seeds
from native cereals and that was the beginning of his
seed bank. Later mission sent him all over the place
to the United States, Central and South America, the Mediterranean, Ethiopia, China,
(07:00):
anywhere pretty much that he could collect large stores of seeds,
and he ultimately collected sixty thousand samples himself in sixty
four different countries. His teams collected two hundred and fifty
thousand samples thirty one thousand wheat specimens alone, and a
visit to Afghanistan even won him the gold medal of
the Russian Geographic Society, of which he became president later.
(07:21):
So thus the Indiana Jones comparison definitely. So. Of course,
during all these travels though he wasn't just blindly collecting,
he was observing what he saw, and in nineteen nine
he published The Geographic Origins of Cultivated Plants, which identified
seven or eight major centers of origin, depending on what
source you look at, for the world's cultivated crops. So,
(07:43):
just to give you an example, and there was a
good pictorial in the national and geographic if you wanted
further illustration of this, but um South Asia, you have rice, cucumber, mango,
and orange kind of spring from from that area, or
show a lot of diversity in that area, wheat, barley
and flax from East Africa. And there are these regions
(08:03):
and in all different areas of the world. And today
scientists consider these centers of diversity rather than centers of origin.
But it was still a really important observation, genetic observation,
geographic genetic observation really at the time. But even as
Babolov's reputation grew and his you know, he's producing these
(08:25):
important works and collecting important specimens, and his government positions
were becoming more and more prestigious, his programs were starting
to lose funding, and by the nineteen thirties his position
had become pretty unstable under Stalin. And there were a
few reasons for this. One. For one thing, Babalov had
come from a wealthy family and was well educated. And
(08:46):
it was also the idea of Mendelian genetics that he
believed in some you know, the idea that some traits
are desirable and all is not equal. This didn't gel
with Stalin's belief in equality at all, it's completely counter
to it. And there was also the pseudo scientist Trophium Losenko.
Lessenko was everything Favolov was not. He was a peasant,
(09:09):
poorly educated, and extremely political, and as his star rose,
Favolov's fell. Lessenko rejected the genetics of mental in favor
of maturism, which was basically a type of Lamarckian genetics.
And in this type of genetics, he believed that acquired
characteristics could be inherited. So just an example for you there,
and I remember this from biology to the giraffe's neck
(09:32):
stretching out, So basically, instead of instead of it being
a series of inherited traits and um, the draft with
the mutation that gives it the slightly large, slightly longer
neck is more likely to survive. Instead of that being
the case, it's the apparent giraffe slightly stretches its neck
over its lifetime and therefore has a baby giraffe with
(09:55):
a slightly longer neck. But it's really weird to think
about it like that when you apply it to like
what if you broke your arm, would your kid have
a slightly irregular arm because of that no, So Lessenko
took that concept and applied it to plants. He thought
they could acquire characteristics from their environment. So, for example,
wheat plants raised in the right environment could potentially produce
(10:17):
wry seeds, which sounds kind of hard to believe exactly.
But Lessenko was also a major proponent of something called vernalization,
which was an old idea but eventually it came to
be really closely associated with him. And it was just
the the idea of exposing seeds to cold temperatures to
shorten their growing cycle. But it was unpredictable and um
(10:41):
it had some pretty serious consequences, as we'll see. But
Stalin liked Lessenko and he liked this variety of genetics
because of a few reasons. Really. Lessenko gave big promises
for what he could do for Russia, and Russia had
of course been in a food crisis since the evolution,
and Lessenko promised high yield wheat crops in just three years, which, hey,
(11:05):
that sounds pretty awesome because by contrast, Babolov knew it
would take twelve years to breed carefully breed better wheat varieties. Um.
But also Lessenko had the right kind of ideology, like
you mentioned earlier. Um, how Vavilov's ideology didn't really fit
with Stalin. Lessenko thought that plants could be educated, like
(11:27):
literally educated, just like Russian peasants could be educated to
replace the elite. Everyone was equal, everything's possible. Um. It
was a way to make science kind of political. So,
according to a New Yorker article by John Seabrook, Vavalov
didn't really realize how serious this threat, though, was. He
(11:49):
thought that the dispute with Lessenko was just a scholarly one,
and it really encouraged debate with him too. You know,
thought that Russia needed to be looking into every viable
option for for preventing famine and for dealing with this crisis,
and was willing to to at least look into and
acknowledge these kind of out their theories. Yeah, Blesenko was
(12:12):
not in the same boat, though. He rose in power
and he became director of the Institute of Genetics of
the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and he's been
called Russia's genetic dictator. Since dissenting scientists were removed, arrested,
or just disappeared. Even the dictator of biology. He had
a pretty big effect on sciences across the board. So
(12:33):
in August nineteen forty Vabolov was arrested with two of
his colleagues and charged with treason an espionage. He was
interrogated and tortured for eleven months before being found guilty
by a tribunal in just five minutes, and he was
sentenced to death by firing squad. So his colleagues were shot,
but Vavolov personally appealed to the head of the secret
(12:54):
police and had his sentence commuted to twenty years in
a prison camp on the Volga River. On January twenty,
nineteen forty three, he died there of starvation, I mean
of all of all things. But during his trial and imprisonment,
Vavlov's colleagues kept up his work. They didn't just abandon
it at all because he had been arrested. They gathered
up his research, they saved his documents, and most importantly,
(13:18):
the scientists who were stationed at that main lining grad
seed bank defended it from Hitler's army during the city's
siege and during the winter of nineteen forty one to
forty two, the scientists who were guarding the collection, which
obviously mean tons of seeds which are edible and nutritious.
We're not just defending it from potential German invaders. They
(13:41):
were defending it from the starving Russians outside too, and
from rats, thousands and thousands of rats that would apparently
invade the collection the institute basements at night, and the
scientists would use metal rods to sort of fend them
off and protect the seeds and one of the crops too.
You know, you can you can keep a wheat seed
(14:02):
as long as you keep it away from the rats
for a few years. That something like potatoes need to
be reso to to stay alive, and so they would
re soap potatoes on the front lawn or in any
available land they could find. And two of these scientists
died inside the building, inside the building with all of
those seeds to eat the first winter. One was a
(14:24):
specialist on rife, one was a specialist on peanuts, and
by the end of the siege in the spring of
n nine, scientists had starved to death rather than eat
their stores of seeds. That's some major commitment. But while
the scientists clearly took the collection seriously and we're willing
to sacrifice their lives for what they saw as their
(14:45):
country's way out of famine. The Soviets didn't really see
it that way. Before the siege, they had ordered that
the cities aren't be evacuated, but they did nothing to
protect the seed Bank hill Or. On the other hand,
he clearly saw the appeal of possessing a copy of
the world genetic resources. So while the main collection in
Leningrad was saved and eventually smuggled out over the Ural Mountains,
(15:06):
some of the many outer stations did fall into German control,
about two hundred of them actually by three and according
to a New Scientist article by Fred Pierce, before the
invasion even happened, scientists from the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes made
plans to seize the research institutes. The really disturbing thing here, though,
is that it wasn't just about science. I mean, you
can you can see the appeal of possessing these huge
(15:29):
supplies of seeds, having all this genetic material at your disposal,
But one of the groups most interested in the seed
seizing was the A A Naarbe, which it was the
ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society set up by none
other than Heinrich Kimmler to prove that the Arians were
the superior race. So there was there was kind of
(15:52):
a superiority manipulation thing going on here to to to
possess all of these all of this genetic material all
and and be able to select the best from it.
So one of these botanists that were sent out to
follow German troops into the Soviet Union and take over
these stations, um that essentially they've been called Hiller's bio pirates,
(16:13):
was a guy named Hinz Bruser. Brusher was put in
charge of a commando unit to raid certain institutes and
brought back huge stores of seeds to the eventual FS
Institute of Plant Genetics at Lenok, which was an old
remote castle in Austria, where those stores, the stores from
Russia were mixed up with earlier German collections that had
(16:36):
been taken from Tibet, so to to really strange different
correct collections they're mixed in. But to add to the
strangeness and the surprisingness of this whole situation, the Institute
of Plant Genetics was staffed by prisoners of war and
a group of women. Jehovah's witnesses that were from a
(16:57):
nearby concentration camp, and they just worked on maintaining the seeds,
planning out ones that needed to be planted, and and
carrying out experiments too, because one of the British POWs
was actually a trained botanist who worked pretty closely with
Lucky Break I mean, I guess though worked closely with
with Brusher to carry out the genetic experiments. Yeah, and
(17:21):
the fate of this particular collection is also kind of
a mystery. Brusher ignored orders to blow the place up
as the Red Army approached. Some of the seeds could
have been eventually returned to Russia. That's one theory. Or
Brusher or one of his British POWs may have taken
possession of some of these seeds. So if it was
the British prisoner botanist guy right, the botanist um. He
(17:42):
actually went on to create a seed company, which is
kind of interesting. Yes, that's a maybe a strange coincidence,
maybe not. And Brusher spent some time in Sweden after
the war before heading to a life in exile in
Argentina where he started a gene bank. Also kind of interesting, yes,
And in n he was shot in his Argentina vineyard.
So a life kind of shrouded in mystery and controversy.
(18:05):
And I don't know if we'll ever know the exact
answer to that one for sure. So that's one group
of seeds. Though out of the many, many collections that
were in Russia, that main institute in Leningrad which is
now St. Petersburg, never fell. The scientists defended it, and
uh it continues on today as the Evoval of Research
(18:27):
Institute of Plant Industry. All these places have very long names,
I know. UM. But just late last year, one of
the institute's main stations where they would plant out things
that couldn't just be stored as frozen seeds. UM, which
is that the Czar's Palace of puff Loss was under
threat of development. International outcry came up because um it
(18:50):
had a lot of really rare specimens, perhaps some specimens
that are contained nowhere else in the world, grown nowhere
else in the world. Um. It's it's basically a garden,
so it would be really really hard to relocate. It's
it's a lot easier to move a vial of seeds
than to dig up an apple tree. And the diversity
there is pretty amazing. I mean, just to give you
(19:11):
a few examples, they have one thousand varieties of strawberries,
which I'm a strawberry fan, so that sounds like pretty nice,
and six hundred types of apples and and lots of
other fruits. It's mostly a fruit based station. Yeah, and
it looks like you wouldn't be the only one who
would be sad if if this were destroyed. Carrie Fowler,
(19:32):
who runs the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the organization that
funds this fall barred Global Seed Vault in Norway, said
that the loss of the collection would be quote the
largest intentional preventible loss of crop diversity in my lifetime.
So pretty significant, pretty serious. And um let me know
if you if you maybe if you live in Russia,
(19:54):
or if you've just followed this story closely. I'm wondering
if it's still tied up in court, because I haven't
been able to find anything either saying that it has
been bulldozed in upscale houses have been built, or that
it's preserved in the strawberries are safe for now, but
let me know. You can email us that history podcast
(20:14):
at how stuff works dot com. And um, also, I
noticed a book that came out recently, and I was
thinking some of my geneticist friends might be interested in
this for a Christmas present. But if you guys are
interested in learning more about the story, it seems like
it would probably be a good source. It's called The
Murder of Nikolai Vavolov by Peter Pringle. I think it
came out in about two thousand seven or two thousand eight,
(20:36):
and I read some reviews for it during this during
this podcast. But if you once again have any updates
on the seed facility or the plant facility in Russia,
or if you just have more scientists suggestions, this was
pretty pretty fun story to research. I mean, I know
it's it's quite tragic, but um I enjoyed it quite
(20:58):
a bit. Send it our way once again. History podcast
at how staff works dot com. We're also on Twitter
at mist in history, and we're on Facebook. And if
you don't have time to read a whole book, but
you still want to learn a little bit more about
seed vaults, we have an article on our website called
house seed Vaults Work, and you can look at it
by visiting our homepage at www dot how stuff works
(21:19):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Debline and Chocolate Boarding and Deblina.
Last week I took a vacation. I went to a
wedding in Indiana, and I was also in Kentucky for
(00:22):
a little bit too, so I was in corn country,
kind of one of the prime areas of corn country,
and I did see a lot of corn on my drive.
I would just drive down the highway, see corn on
both sides. Um I noticed some growing right up to
an Arby's, like literally right up to the parking lot,
which I thought was kind of funny. And as soon
(00:44):
as I got home, I picked up my July National
Geographic and I noticed an article that sort of sparked
my interest, possibly because I had just seen all this corn,
but it was an article on agriculture by Charles Siebert,
and it was specific on seed banks. And I know
you're kind of a fan of seed banks, or you're
(01:05):
interested in them, at least I am, And I have
no idea why, considering that I'm not interested in saving
apparently in any other aspect of my life. But before
we go any further, let's talk about seed banks a
little bit for those who don't know what they are.
The basic idea behind seed banks is that they are
backup copies of our agricultural history. So as we've turned
more and more toward monoculture crops and high yield strains
(01:28):
since the Green Revolution of the nineteen forties, we've boosted
production and prevented an estimated one billion people from starving.
But we've also abandoned a lot of the diversity that
made that specialized breeding possible in the first place. If
the world's top wheat varieties, for instance, were suddenly struck
by a blight, the resistance to fight that blight might
(01:51):
unfortunately be found in some old variety or some wild
variety that we have already lost. So the seed bank
is basically just an insurance policy, a way to preserve
the wild species and to preserve those ancient, domesticated varieties
of crops that aren't widely grown anymore. Because people are
growing certain high yield varieties, you know, we keep them
(02:13):
around just in case. And as I learned in this
National Geographic article, though, the seed bank for the long
term preservation as opposed to just for next year's crop
is a pretty new idea, one that came about in
the nineteen twenties nineteen thirties in Russia, and it was
the idea of a botanist named Nikolai Vavilov, who is
sometimes called the Indiana Jones of botany. So that's our
(02:36):
little hook there to get you into this one, because
he did really take part in some interesting, adventurous world
travels in pursuit of his seed collections. Yeah, but as
we'll see, seed banks and the genetic principles that guide
them could be pretty controversial topics. People died for their
scientific beliefs in the story that we're about to tell you,
(02:58):
and scientists starved other than eat their stores of seeds.
It's something for This is something for everyone podcast. I
would say genetics world issues like famine and commercial agriculture,
plus a healthy dose of World War two era intrigue.
But technically it all starts in a peaceful monastery in Austria. Yeah,
so we're gonna rewind a little bit to biology. One
(03:20):
oh one. Most of us today know Gregor Mendel is
the father of genetics, but during his lifetime he was
among a well educated monk who had a penchant for
breeding peas and studying their inherited traits. I swear I
can still see the little illustration in my biology textbook
of the peas and how they're crossed, and the photo
(03:41):
of Gregor Mendel next to it. But after Mendel's death
in eighteen eighty four, his revolutionary work was largely forgotten
until nineteen hundred when a guy named William Bateson, who
is considered the father of the science of genetics, popularized
Mendelian genetics of the University of Cambridge, and he wrote
(04:02):
the first genetics textbook on it, and within a few
years it was it was the new dominant theory in genetics.
And one of bates AND's students was young and Nikolai Babolov,
who we mentioned earlier, and he had been born in
Moscow in eighteen eighties seven to a wealthy merchant family.
Before studying with Bateson, Vavilov had graduated from a Russian
(04:22):
agricultural academy, one of the many that were established after
a terrible famine of eighteen ninety two, and famine is
going to prove to be a major theme here. So
just keep going mind for the past. Yes. After learning
about genetics and the new scientific possibilities to botany, Vavilov
decided that he'd devote himself to helping the poor, finding
and breeding strains of crops that could grow in all
(04:44):
parts of Russia, eliminating the possibility of famine. Yeah, and
he really he did that quite successfully, had a good career.
After school. He went to work as a professor, and
soon he rose to be deputy head of the Bureau
for Applied Botany. His career under Lenin ESPEC sally thrived,
and other positions followed. He became the head of the
Department of Applied Botany at Saratov University, the head of
(05:06):
the Institute of Experimental Agronomy UM, and later it's president
at the v I. Lenin All Union Academy. A lot
of words here, a lot of institutes and academies, but
just to give you a sense of how successful he was.
Eventually he even became the director of the Institute of Genetics.
But all the while he did have that motivating force
(05:27):
of of preventing famine, helping Russia develop strains of crops
that that could grow all over the country. Which obviously
has a very diverse climate. But he knew that to
breed better seeds, he'd have to have lots and lots
and lots of genes to work with to get those
desirable traits that he needed, things like cold resistance, drought resistance,
(05:50):
pests and resistance whatever you're you're trying to imbue in
the plant you're creating. And he knew that he'd need
not just the wild relatives of common crops, but the
ancient domesticated varieties to which are called land acres. So,
just to give a further example of my Indiana corn situation,
not the corn that's growing on your Indiana farm, but
(06:12):
the corn that metho Americans would have domesticated thousands of
years ago, as well as that domesticated corns wild ancestors.
So really every potential avenue for genetic success you could imagine. Yeah,
so that sounds like a pretty daunting task or goal,
but he so he started seriously collecting. In nineteen sixteen
on a trip to Iran Russian soldier station. There, we're
(06:35):
getting sick from some mysterious ailment, and Fabolov determined that
the wheat fields their bread was made from also contained
poisonous weeds and plants with fungal infection, so he solved
that problem there. But he also came home with seeds
from native cereals and that was the beginning of his
seed bank. Later mission sent him all over the place
to the United States, Central and South America, the Mediterranean, Ethiopia, China,
(07:00):
anywhere pretty much that he could collect large stores of seeds,
and he ultimately collected sixty thousand samples himself in sixty
four different countries. His teams collected two hundred and fifty
thousand samples thirty one thousand wheat specimens alone, and a
visit to Afghanistan even won him the gold medal of
the Russian Geographic Society, of which he became president later.
(07:21):
So thus the Indiana Jones comparison definitely. So. Of course,
during all these travels though he wasn't just blindly collecting,
he was observing what he saw, and in nineteen nine
he published The Geographic Origins of Cultivated Plants, which identified
seven or eight major centers of origin, depending on what
source you look at, for the world's cultivated crops. So,
(07:43):
just to give you an example, and there was a
good pictorial in the national and geographic if you wanted
further illustration of this, but um South Asia, you have rice, cucumber, mango,
and orange kind of spring from from that area, or
show a lot of diversity in that area, wheat, barley
and flax from East Africa. And there are these regions
(08:03):
and in all different areas of the world. And today
scientists consider these centers of diversity rather than centers of origin.
But it was still a really important observation, genetic observation,
geographic genetic observation really at the time. But even as
Babolov's reputation grew and his you know, he's producing these
(08:25):
important works and collecting important specimens, and his government positions
were becoming more and more prestigious, his programs were starting
to lose funding, and by the nineteen thirties his position
had become pretty unstable under Stalin. And there were a
few reasons for this. One. For one thing, Babalov had
come from a wealthy family and was well educated. And
(08:46):
it was also the idea of Mendelian genetics that he
believed in some you know, the idea that some traits
are desirable and all is not equal. This didn't gel
with Stalin's belief in equality at all, it's completely counter
to it. And there was also the pseudo scientist Trophium Losenko.
Lessenko was everything Favolov was not. He was a peasant,
(09:09):
poorly educated, and extremely political, and as his star rose,
Favolov's fell. Lessenko rejected the genetics of mental in favor
of maturism, which was basically a type of Lamarckian genetics.
And in this type of genetics, he believed that acquired
characteristics could be inherited. So just an example for you there,
and I remember this from biology to the giraffe's neck
(09:32):
stretching out, So basically, instead of instead of it being
a series of inherited traits and um, the draft with
the mutation that gives it the slightly large, slightly longer
neck is more likely to survive. Instead of that being
the case, it's the apparent giraffe slightly stretches its neck
over its lifetime and therefore has a baby giraffe with
(09:55):
a slightly longer neck. But it's really weird to think
about it like that when you apply it to like
what if you broke your arm, would your kid have
a slightly irregular arm because of that no, So Lessenko
took that concept and applied it to plants. He thought
they could acquire characteristics from their environment. So, for example,
wheat plants raised in the right environment could potentially produce
(10:17):
wry seeds, which sounds kind of hard to believe exactly.
But Lessenko was also a major proponent of something called vernalization,
which was an old idea but eventually it came to
be really closely associated with him. And it was just
the the idea of exposing seeds to cold temperatures to
shorten their growing cycle. But it was unpredictable and um
(10:41):
it had some pretty serious consequences, as we'll see. But
Stalin liked Lessenko and he liked this variety of genetics
because of a few reasons. Really. Lessenko gave big promises
for what he could do for Russia, and Russia had
of course been in a food crisis since the evolution,
and Lessenko promised high yield wheat crops in just three years, which, hey,
(11:05):
that sounds pretty awesome because by contrast, Babolov knew it
would take twelve years to breed carefully breed better wheat varieties. Um.
But also Lessenko had the right kind of ideology, like
you mentioned earlier. Um, how Vavilov's ideology didn't really fit
with Stalin. Lessenko thought that plants could be educated, like
(11:27):
literally educated, just like Russian peasants could be educated to
replace the elite. Everyone was equal, everything's possible. Um. It
was a way to make science kind of political. So,
according to a New Yorker article by John Seabrook, Vavalov
didn't really realize how serious this threat, though, was. He
(11:49):
thought that the dispute with Lessenko was just a scholarly one,
and it really encouraged debate with him too. You know,
thought that Russia needed to be looking into every viable
option for for preventing famine and for dealing with this crisis,
and was willing to to at least look into and
acknowledge these kind of out their theories. Yeah, Blesenko was
(12:12):
not in the same boat, though. He rose in power
and he became director of the Institute of Genetics of
the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and he's been
called Russia's genetic dictator. Since dissenting scientists were removed, arrested,
or just disappeared. Even the dictator of biology. He had
a pretty big effect on sciences across the board. So
(12:33):
in August nineteen forty Vabolov was arrested with two of
his colleagues and charged with treason an espionage. He was
interrogated and tortured for eleven months before being found guilty
by a tribunal in just five minutes, and he was
sentenced to death by firing squad. So his colleagues were shot,
but Vavolov personally appealed to the head of the secret
(12:54):
police and had his sentence commuted to twenty years in
a prison camp on the Volga River. On January twenty,
nineteen forty three, he died there of starvation, I mean
of all of all things. But during his trial and imprisonment,
Vavlov's colleagues kept up his work. They didn't just abandon
it at all because he had been arrested. They gathered
up his research, they saved his documents, and most importantly,
(13:18):
the scientists who were stationed at that main lining grad
seed bank defended it from Hitler's army during the city's
siege and during the winter of nineteen forty one to
forty two, the scientists who were guarding the collection, which
obviously mean tons of seeds which are edible and nutritious.
We're not just defending it from potential German invaders. They
(13:41):
were defending it from the starving Russians outside too, and
from rats, thousands and thousands of rats that would apparently
invade the collection the institute basements at night, and the
scientists would use metal rods to sort of fend them
off and protect the seeds and one of the crops too.
You know, you can you can keep a wheat seed
(14:02):
as long as you keep it away from the rats
for a few years. That something like potatoes need to
be reso to to stay alive, and so they would
re soap potatoes on the front lawn or in any
available land they could find. And two of these scientists
died inside the building, inside the building with all of
those seeds to eat the first winter. One was a
(14:24):
specialist on rife, one was a specialist on peanuts, and
by the end of the siege in the spring of
n nine, scientists had starved to death rather than eat
their stores of seeds. That's some major commitment. But while
the scientists clearly took the collection seriously and we're willing
to sacrifice their lives for what they saw as their
(14:45):
country's way out of famine. The Soviets didn't really see
it that way. Before the siege, they had ordered that
the cities aren't be evacuated, but they did nothing to
protect the seed Bank hill Or. On the other hand,
he clearly saw the appeal of possessing a copy of
the world genetic resources. So while the main collection in
Leningrad was saved and eventually smuggled out over the Ural Mountains,
(15:06):
some of the many outer stations did fall into German control,
about two hundred of them actually by three and according
to a New Scientist article by Fred Pierce, before the
invasion even happened, scientists from the Kaiser Wilhelm institutes made
plans to seize the research institutes. The really disturbing thing here, though,
is that it wasn't just about science. I mean, you
can you can see the appeal of possessing these huge
(15:29):
supplies of seeds, having all this genetic material at your disposal,
But one of the groups most interested in the seed
seizing was the A A Naarbe, which it was the
ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society set up by none
other than Heinrich Kimmler to prove that the Arians were
the superior race. So there was there was kind of
(15:52):
a superiority manipulation thing going on here to to to
possess all of these all of this genetic material all
and and be able to select the best from it.
So one of these botanists that were sent out to
follow German troops into the Soviet Union and take over
these stations, um that essentially they've been called Hiller's bio pirates,
(16:13):
was a guy named Hinz Bruser. Brusher was put in
charge of a commando unit to raid certain institutes and
brought back huge stores of seeds to the eventual FS
Institute of Plant Genetics at Lenok, which was an old
remote castle in Austria, where those stores, the stores from
Russia were mixed up with earlier German collections that had
(16:36):
been taken from Tibet, so to to really strange different
correct collections they're mixed in. But to add to the
strangeness and the surprisingness of this whole situation, the Institute
of Plant Genetics was staffed by prisoners of war and
a group of women. Jehovah's witnesses that were from a
(16:57):
nearby concentration camp, and they just worked on maintaining the seeds,
planning out ones that needed to be planted, and and
carrying out experiments too, because one of the British POWs
was actually a trained botanist who worked pretty closely with
Lucky Break I mean, I guess though worked closely with
with Brusher to carry out the genetic experiments. Yeah, and
(17:21):
the fate of this particular collection is also kind of
a mystery. Brusher ignored orders to blow the place up
as the Red Army approached. Some of the seeds could
have been eventually returned to Russia. That's one theory. Or
Brusher or one of his British POWs may have taken
possession of some of these seeds. So if it was
the British prisoner botanist guy right, the botanist um. He
(17:42):
actually went on to create a seed company, which is
kind of interesting. Yes, that's a maybe a strange coincidence,
maybe not. And Brusher spent some time in Sweden after
the war before heading to a life in exile in
Argentina where he started a gene bank. Also kind of interesting, yes,
And in n he was shot in his Argentina vineyard.
So a life kind of shrouded in mystery and controversy.
(18:05):
And I don't know if we'll ever know the exact
answer to that one for sure. So that's one group
of seeds. Though out of the many, many collections that
were in Russia, that main institute in Leningrad which is
now St. Petersburg, never fell. The scientists defended it, and
uh it continues on today as the Evoval of Research
(18:27):
Institute of Plant Industry. All these places have very long names,
I know. UM. But just late last year, one of
the institute's main stations where they would plant out things
that couldn't just be stored as frozen seeds. UM, which
is that the Czar's Palace of puff Loss was under
threat of development. International outcry came up because um it
(18:50):
had a lot of really rare specimens, perhaps some specimens
that are contained nowhere else in the world, grown nowhere
else in the world. Um. It's it's basically a garden,
so it would be really really hard to relocate. It's
it's a lot easier to move a vial of seeds
than to dig up an apple tree. And the diversity
there is pretty amazing. I mean, just to give you
(19:11):
a few examples, they have one thousand varieties of strawberries,
which I'm a strawberry fan, so that sounds like pretty nice,
and six hundred types of apples and and lots of
other fruits. It's mostly a fruit based station. Yeah, and
it looks like you wouldn't be the only one who
would be sad if if this were destroyed. Carrie Fowler,
(19:32):
who runs the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the organization that
funds this fall barred Global Seed Vault in Norway, said
that the loss of the collection would be quote the
largest intentional preventible loss of crop diversity in my lifetime.
So pretty significant, pretty serious. And um let me know
if you if you maybe if you live in Russia,
(19:54):
or if you've just followed this story closely. I'm wondering
if it's still tied up in court, because I haven't
been able to find anything either saying that it has
been bulldozed in upscale houses have been built, or that
it's preserved in the strawberries are safe for now, but
let me know. You can email us that history podcast
(20:14):
at how stuff works dot com. And um, also, I
noticed a book that came out recently, and I was
thinking some of my geneticist friends might be interested in
this for a Christmas present. But if you guys are
interested in learning more about the story, it seems like
it would probably be a good source. It's called The
Murder of Nikolai Vavolov by Peter Pringle. I think it
came out in about two thousand seven or two thousand eight,
(20:36):
and I read some reviews for it during this during
this podcast. But if you once again have any updates
on the seed facility or the plant facility in Russia,
or if you just have more scientists suggestions, this was
pretty pretty fun story to research. I mean, I know
it's it's quite tragic, but um I enjoyed it quite
(20:58):
a bit. Send it our way once again. History podcast
at how staff works dot com. We're also on Twitter
at mist in history, and we're on Facebook. And if
you don't have time to read a whole book, but
you still want to learn a little bit more about
seed vaults, we have an article on our website called
house seed Vaults Work, and you can look at it
by visiting our homepage at www dot how stuff works
(21:19):
dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,
Stuff from the Future. Join how stof Work staff as
we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
The How Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise. Download
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