Nikolai Vavilov

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (Николай Иванович Вавилов, November 25/(November 13), 1887— January 26 1943) was a prominent Russian botanist and geneticist.

He was born to a family of a commersant.

He organized a series of botanical-agromomical expeditions all over the world in the development of his theory about centers of origin of cultured plants and created the largest in the world collection of plant seeds (which was tragically saved during the Siege of Leningrad).

He was a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, President of All-Union Geographical Society and a recipient of the Lenin Prize.

In 1940 he was repressed as a defender of "bourgeois pseudoscience" genetics in struggle with Lysenkoism and died in prison in 1943.

The standard botanical author abbreviation Vavilov is applied to species he described.

Timeline

• 1911 - graduated from the Moscow Agricultural Institute
• 1917-1921 - professor of agronomy departmen of the Saratov University
• 1919 - theory of the immunity for plants.
• 1920 - formulation of the law of homology series in genetical mutability
• 1921(-1940) - chairman of the applied botanics and selection section in Petrograd, which in 1924 was reorganized into the All-Union Institute of Applied Botanics and New Crops and in 1930, into the All-Union Institute of Plant Cultivation, with Vavilov being direcor until August, 1940.
• 1926 - Lenin Award
• 1930—1940 - head of the genetics laboratory in Moscow, later reorganized into the Institute of Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
• 1931—1940 - President of the All-Union Geographical Society.
• 1940 - repressed.
• 1943 - died imprisoned, in Saratov.

The USSR Academy of Sciences established the Vavilov Award (1965) and the Vavilov Medal (1968).

Works

• Земледельческий Афганистан. (1929) (Agricultural Afghanistan)
• Селекция как наука. (1934) (Selection as science)
• Закон гомологических рядов в наследственной изменчивости. (1935) (The law of homology series in genetical mutability)
• Учение о происхождении культурных растений после Дарвина. (1940) (The theory of origins of cultivated plants after Darwin)

Works in English

• Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants (translated by Doris Love). 1992. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0521404274
• Five Continents (translated by Doris Love). 1997. IPGRI, Rome; VIR, St. Petersburg ISBN 9290433027