Famines and Nickolai Vavilov
Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 2:18PM 
I've been reading quite a bit lately about about Nickolai Vavilov, someone that I'm sure most of us have never heard of. This week I completed writing a new chapter for my book about the history of famines, and I'm going to read from that material tonight at the Walk Thru History class.
Vavilov is a tragically ironic figure...
He was one of the pioneering and premier agriculture geneticists of the 20th century. He travelled all around the world during the 1920's and 1930's, collecting and collating what was, at the time, the largest seed bank in the world in Leningrad. His research into plant diversity allowed agri-geneticists to develop methods for crop diversity to protect food sources from droughts and diseases such as the potato famines of the 1840's that devastated Ireland (and severely impacted Scotland and the Low Countries).
The tragic irony comes in how he died. He got on Stalin's bad side when Stalin was implementing his genocidally stupid collectivization programs in the 1930's which lead to millions of deaths, particularly in the Ukraine. Stalin partially blamed the famines on Vavilov, rationalizing that his genetic research had failed when they were actually the result of criminally negligent planning and management of the Soviet economy.
Vavilov, the man who did more to teach the world about how to avoid famines than anyone before died of malnitrution in the Soviet gulag in 1943.
If you're anywhere near the Manna green building tonight drop by the class, or start saving up for a copy of my book when it become available in the Spring ;-)
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