In China, many people know that there was a famous agricultural scientist Michurin in the Soviet period, but they are not familiar with another great agricultural scientist, Vavilov.
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, a Soviet botanist and geneticist of the last century, devoted his life to the study of wheat, corn and other cereals that support the world's population, and achieved remarkable achievements.
However, such an agricultural scientist was inhumanly tortured, starving to death at the age of 55! Disappeared for decades! What kind of heart-wrenching story is hidden behind him?
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov
Vavilov was born on November 26, 1887 in Moscow, Russia. In 1906, he was admitted to the Faculty of Agriculture of Moscow University. After graduating from university in 1911, he stayed on to teach and engaged in the research of cereal crop variety resources. In 1913 Vavilov was sent to England for further studies to conduct research in plant immunology at cambridge university.
In Europe, Vavylov studied under the famous British geneticist Bateson, who was familiar with mendel's genetic principles and carried out plant immunity research. He firmly believes that genetics can revolutionize the future of agriculture.
Vavilov deduced that genes control traits such as disease resistance, while some recessive alleles are hidden by dominant alleles, and that only through hybrid breeding can these traits be lifted and exposed.
He knew that these "recessive genes" were difficult to find in farm plant varieties and should go to the most remote and uninhabited areas of the world in search of their wild ancestors.
When World War I broke out in August 1914, Vavilov's academic journey to Europe came to an abrupt end and he was recalled to China.
Vavilov's first mission on his return was to be sent to Iran to help the army solve a difficult problem: some soldiers had spasms, hallucinations, and even death after eating local bread.
Through investigation and experiments, Vavilov successfully found the culprit of the disease, a fungus carried by the "Persian wheat", a smut variety, which caused poisoning after eating.
Because the mystery of "hallucinogenic bread" was solved within the stipulated time limit, the authorities approved him to carry out a field expedition to collect wild grain resources. The first stop of his expedition was the no-man's land in the Pamir Plateau Valley in western Iran at the time.
The site of Vavilov's expedition to no man's land in the Pamir Plateau Valley
From 1916 to 1940, Vavilov conducted more than 180 scientific expeditions, Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean coast, India, China... Throughout his footprints, the world's first seed banks were built. He crossed the collected cereal germplasm resources and selected the dominant species from them for cultivation and promotion.
In the process of long-term investigation and research, Vavilov proposed the famous "homologous series of laws of genetic variation", which caused a sensation in the genetics community. According to his theory, if one knows a series of types of a species, it is expected that there will be parallel types in other species and genera, and new plant types will be discovered. His prediction can be called the Mendeleev periodic table of the plant kingdom.
Vavilov also proposed the "Center of Origin of Cultivated Plants Theory". He divided the world's centers of origin for cultivated plants into 8 centers of origin and 3 subcentres. Among them, our country is one of them, and the main origin crops are rice, sorghum, millet, soybeans, buckwheat, hemp and other 136 species. To this day, botanists still rely on Vavilov's division as an important basis when discussing the origins of cultivated crops.
There are 8 origin centers and 3 sub-centers of the world's cultivated crops
Vavilov pointed out that a crop often originates in several centers, and each center has its own unique species, which often have different physiological characteristics and number of chromosomes. This is of great guiding significance for breeders to collect original materials to carry out breeding research.
The period from 1924 to 1929 was Vavilov's golden age. He worked hard all the time. In five years, he traveled thousands of kilometers, collected a large number of seed specimens and fruits of cultivated crops, founded the largest scientific research institute in the country at that time, the All-Union Crop Cultivation Institute, and founded the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences. At the same time, he has published more than 500 academic papers at home and abroad.
In 1929, there was a major shift in Soviet economic policy. Industrialization must be at a high speed, agricultural collectivization must be carried out at a high speed, the development of the national economy must be carried out at a high speed, and the training of scholars and scientists must also be carried out at a high speed. Similar to China's Great Leap Forward in 1958, but 30 years before China.
The implementation of the First Five-Year Plan by the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1932 was the beginning of the first construction in human history according to a detailed plan prepared in advance. 15 million hectares of land reclaimed. Soon believing that the targets were lagging behind, he further proposed plans to reclaim 130 million hectares of arable land, and called for the construction of 50 research institutes and 180 regional experimental stations in just a few months; They are required to provide collective farms and state farms with the finest seeds and the most advanced methods of cultivating the land and operating agriculture as quickly as possible.
Vavilov was puzzled, and this violation of objective laws was bound to fail miserably. For this reason, the modern biological genetics school represented by Vavilov and the progressive biologists represented by Lysenko have engaged in a long and fierce struggle.
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko
Lysenko is 11 years younger than Vavilov. At first, Lee was just a small agronomist in Azerbaijan, working at a breeding station. Although Ukraine and Azerbaijan are located further south, winter crops are occasionally threatened by frost weather.
In 1929, Li's father stumbled upon wheat seeds that had been wintered in the snow, and sowing them in the spring could accelerate growth and achieve higher yields. On this basis, Lysenko developed a breeding method called "vernalization treatment", which moistens and freezes seeds before planting to accelerate their growth. Lysenko exaggerated his findings as a panacea for the threat of wheat frosts.
After his "vernalization method" appeared in the newspapers, it aroused Vavilov's interest and began to promote him. But what I didn't expect was that this was also the beginning of Vavilov's doom.
Because Vavilov severely criticized Lysenko for exaggerating the yield-increasing effects of the vernal breeding method and deliberately cheating, Lysenko held a grudge.
This is an era of increasing demand for more food. Lysenko's denial of genetic genetics and his adherence to the concept of biological evolutionary acquired genetics was, politically, a theory that catered to the demand for grain at a high rate, so it received widespread attention from the people at that time, especially by Stalin's affirmation, becoming "Stalin's scientific cardinal".
After Lysenko gained power, he began a 30-year political persecution of a large number of geneticists, including his former mentor Vavilov.
From 1935 to 1939, Vavilov was relieved of many important positions, and newspapers publicly criticized him as "an accomplice of the enemy of the people." The Seventh International Conference on Genetics, originally scheduled for Moscow, was postponed to 1939 and rescheduled in London, and Vavilov, as president of the congress, was not allowed to participate.
On August 6, 1940, Vavilov was secretly arrested in the town of Chernovo on a scientific expedition to western Ukraine and escorted to Concentration Camp I in Saratov. The death penalty was pronounced without a formal trial, which was later commuted to ten years' imprisonment. Due to chronic malnutrition, Vavilov died in Saratov prison on 26 January 1943 at the age of 55.
The long rampage of Lysenko's pseudoscience in the Soviet Union and Vavilov's death are undoubtedly the misfortunes of Soviet science, and the lessons are very profound. It was not until 1955 that Vavilov was completely rehabilitated and fully restored to his reputation. People built his statues and monuments in his cemetery to commemorate forever the scientific superstar who fell in the dark.
Vavilov will always live in the hearts of the people of the world