9
The Siege
The greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture, especially a bread grain.
—Thomas Jefferson, “Summary of Public Service”
Man shall not live by bread alone.
—Matthew 4:4
On June, 22, 1941, Hitler’s soldiers crossed the Soviet border. By September, they had arrived at the edge of Leningrad. Once the city of the czars and their palaces, Leningrad was, in 1941, the cultural heart of the Soviet Union. It was the center of music, art, and science. Initially the goal was to take the city, but in a last-minute change of strategy, the Germans decided on a blockade. They calculated that it would take just weeks—or, at maximum, months—to starve out the city. After Leningrad, they would take on the rest of the Soviet Union.
By late September the Nazis had severed all Leningrad’s connections to the world except the remotest paths and, once winter settled over the city, the wide route over Lake Ladoga up into the Ural Mountains. No fuel or food could get in. Little could get out. Young men by then had already gone to the war front, leaving Leningrad a city of children, those too old to fight, and women, all of whom began to stockpile any resources they could. At the time, a few million people lived in Leningrad, and among them are an equal number of stories about what they tried to save during that autumn. In this cacophony of tragedy, one story stands out—the story of the people protecting Nikolai Vavilov’s seed collection.
Hitler created a special SS commando unit, the Russland-Sammelkommando, led by Heinz Brücher, whose only goal was to find and take Vavilov’s seeds both from Leningrad and from the research stations across the Soviet Union.1 Hitler’s head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, sought to settle Germans in much of the western Soviet Union and Poland. Brücher believed that Vavilov’s seed collections would be necessary in order to make this conquered land—so different from Germany—productive.2 Those running Vavilov’s institute had to save the collection not only from bombs but also from Brücher and his unit.
The seeds at most immediate risk were not seeds at all but potatoes. In the Andes, Vavilov had collected thousands of pounds of potatoes of more than six thousand varieties, potatoes with potentially immense value to the Soviet Union (and the world). But potatoes store poorly as seeds, and seed potatoes, like those used for planting in Ireland, store worse. So at the time, the best option was to plant the potatoes and harvest them anew, which Vavilov and his team did each year at Pavlovsk, an experimental station located at a former residence of the czars around thirty kilometers (eighteen miles) southeast of Leningrad. But early on in the blockade the Nazis had begun to bomb the outskirts of the city, including Pavlovsk. The field in which the potatoes were planted was under fire.
Abraham Y. Kameraz and Olga A. Voskresenskaya, the de facto leaders of the collection, raced to gather the potatoes into boxes in the fields, doing their best to include at least some of each variety. They ran beneath the crowns of orchard trees that in the spring would be fragrant with the blossoms of hundreds of varieties of cherries, plums, and apples. They ran between artillery shells to pick them one by one out of the cold ground and put them in the boxes. They then asked the Red Army soldiers, who were themselves convinced of the value of the potatoes, to help transport the boxes. The soldiers helped pick up the boxes and drove them in military trucks to Saint Isaac’s Square, in Leningrad, where the most complete collection of the seeds had already been gathered. This work of moving potatoes and other samples continued, furiously, until the Nazis took Pavlovsk.
On Saint Isaac’s Square the seeds and potatoes were stored in the dark recesses of a building at 44 Herzen Street. The workers who remained with the collection decided to create duplicates of the most valuable crop varieties, which would then be moved. But which were the most valuable? The workers decided quickly, as best they could. But even as they made the duplicates, they knew they faced a second problem: how to evacuate so many seeds now that the city was completely surrounded. The whole collection—more than one hundred thousand samples and five tons of seeds—could be moved, it was thought, one small parcel at a time. A plan was hatched to transport some of the collection hundreds of miles across Lake Ladoga, once it froze, to the Ural Mountains. Other seeds could be given to people to carry in their pockets or hand luggage as they evacuated the city along the last open routes, though this obviously offered no salvation for potatoes. Duplicates of a larger number of seeds were packed into boxes with double walls that would be transported by train. The samples made it to a train car, but it was too late. After six months on the track, waiting for a time when it was safe to move—which never came—the train car was unpacked and the seeds brought back to the collection. Some seeds made it out, but few. The Nazis had surrounded the city too completely, and winter was coming fast and hard. The scholars in the seed bank would just need to save the seeds where they had been consolidated, at 44 Herzen Street. The men and women there would spend as long as they had to on their singular mission.
At first the scholars were guarding the collection from the Germans—and with them the Finns, who were aiding in the blockade. But as the fall of 1942 turned to winter and food became scarcer, it became clear that they were also preserving the seeds from their fellow Russians, Russians who needed food. The government of Leningrad calculated that just a thirty-day supply of food remained and so allotted its manual laborers 250 grams of a mixture of bread and bran per person per day; just 125 grams per day was allocated for everyone else, including those working in the collections. That was to be the entire daily diet of millions of people. Hunger stalked the city.
Hunger meant that the collection was threatened not only by the physical conditions—the deadly cold and the equally dangerous wet—but also by the threat that hungry citizens of Leningrad might, in desperation, eat the seeds. While the collection represented a repository of genetic history, it was also, more simply, food. In the building at 44 Herzen Street were tons of rice seeds and wheat—which, of course, are simply rice and wheat grains—potatoes, and so much more. Break-ins started to occur once desperate people realized what was inside. The collection smelled of fruits, berries, and grains. A human could smell the richness of the collections through the walls. So could the rats.
The rats and mice of Leningrad are said to have been even more numerous in the first winter of the siege because humans started to eat the city’s cats. Like the humans, the rats and mice were starving and cold, and they found the collection. They began to chew through the paper and wooden containers housing the seeds. The only thing that could be done was to further increase the protection around the seeds. Seeds in wood or paper were moved to metal. Metal containers were wrapped as tightly together as was possible. In eighteen rooms, the seeds were cared for by hand, one seed and one box at a time. The windows had been blown out by the bombings and boarded up, so the rooms were dark. Without electricity this meant that all work had to be done by the flicker of kerosene lamps. Finally, when the workers were convinced that the rats and mice were gone from each room, the rooms were sealed. The seals on each room were checked each day. Three to five workers staffed the building twenty-four hours a day. Eventually they even barricaded themselves in, neither coming nor going.
Outside, as of February, several hundred thousand Russians had already starved to death. The ration was no longer bread but instead malt flour, cellulose, and calfskins, foodstuffs on which no one could survive. Over its nine-hundred-day duration, the siege would ultimately claim 1.5 million Russian lives. Those who survived the hunger often died of cold (winter temperatures reached minus forty degrees Celsius, which also happens to be minus forty degrees Fahrenheit). No heat existed in the city; both coal and wood fuel were gone.
The scholars, too, were cold and hungry. What made their plight unusual was that while those outside had little access to food, the workers in the collection were surrounded by it. Their bodies were malnourished in a room filled with sustenance. At one point it became clear that, to be saved, the potatoes that had been rescued and were being stored in the cold needed to be reburied in the soil. The potatoes had already received so much extra care. They were rescued from Pavlovsk. They were also kept warm with a small fire in the stove even while the workers couldn’t afford to use any wood to heat themselves and their families. If the potatoes froze solid, they would die—which, of course, was also true for the families of the workers. The workers might simply have consumed them instead of replanting; history would have forgiven them. They did not. Yet as their hunger grew, the scientists began to require of each other that no one go into a collection room on his or her own. They must always have company, so that no one might be tempted.
Meanwhile, Heinz Brücher coordinated the seizure of Vavilov’s seed collections from some of the experiment stations. That this had not already happened in Leningrad was a sort of good news. Also good news was that the collection had not been bombed. The workers in the collection breathed a sigh of relief each time a bomb failed to hit them. Contrary to hopes that the Germans would retreat, and with them the siege, the siege continued throughout the summer. It continued for another year. It would continue until the spring of 1944.
By the winter of 1942, no one working in the collection was healthy any longer. Dmitri Ivanov was in the poorest condition. Ivanov was one of the oldest. He had been directly trained by Vavilov and had, with Vavilov’s help, assembled the largest collection of rice varieties ever to exist, rice that could grow anywhere. Ivanov was starving to death amid this rice. But he would not eat it, even as the winter progressed. With time, he grew so hungry and gaunt that his body could take no more. In early January he died sitting at a typewriter, surrounded by bags of rice grains.
Ivanov’s death was followed by those of others. Alexander Stchukin, a peanut specialist, died at his desk. A man named Gleiber, the keeper of Vavilov’s field notes, died of starvation surrounded by those notes. Soon afterward, Georgy Krier, the man in charge of herbs, also died. Then Liliya Rodina, the oat specialist, was gone, followed by A. Malygina, A. Korzun, N. Leontjevsky, M. Shcheglov, and G. Kovalevsky as their names are recorded in Russian histories. All told, more than thirty of the workers from the VIR who remained during the siege would die. Presented with a choice between saving their own lives and saving Vavilov’s great collection, they all chose the collection. They died, they believed, that some future generation might live. They died on behalf of a greater project, a great cathedral of knowledge and plants whose legacy would, they hoped, far outlast them.
As for Vavilov himself, he was missing. His disappearance had occurred two years earlier, in 1940. He’d been out collecting plants in the Carpathian Mountains in the Ukrainian region of the Soviet Union when on August 6 a black car with tinted windows pulled up. Vavilov was asked to get into the car: “Stalin’s orders!” He obliged. The car drove away, down and out of the mountains. That was the last Vavilov’s friends had seen of him as of the winter of 1942, when they sat guarding the collections of seeds.
Vavilov had been arrested for collecting plants before, and each time, reason, justice, or both had prevailed. But Vavilov no longer lived in a right and reasonable country. He lived in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.3 Vavilov was the most vocal and well-known scientist in the country, and his work proceeded from a modern understanding of both genetics and evolution. This put him in opposition to the scientist Stalin had chosen to be his right-hand man when it came to all decisions about science, Trofim Lysenko. By extension, this put him in opposition to Stalin, and no one stood in opposition to Stalin for very long.4
Soon after his capture Vavilov was imprisoned in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, accused of espionage and of supporting the “false” science of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin. He was, in effect, accused of acknowledging what biologists call the modern synthesis (the coming together of Darwin’s insights about natural selection and those of Mendel about the rules of inheritance). Vavilov was a revolutionary, and truth was the revolution—truth as elaborated through the study of rare crops, genetics, and evolution. Vavilov was the nation’s most vocal advocate for science, a man celebrated around the world for his achievement. Surely if he had the chance to argue, Vavilov could convince those in power that he was doing nothing radical, that his work was necessary for the Soviet empire. But Vavilov was up against enemies that did not necessarily obey the laws of reason: the Soviet Union, Stalin, and the agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko.
Lysenko was a farmer who had shown that one could improve the yield of some wheat varieties by shocking them with cold, convincing the seeds that they had been through winter. This approach, called vernalization, did help increase the number of seeds able to begin growing early in the spring. It was a way of mimicking winter in a controlled way. But as it is said in Russia, when a man has a new hammer, everything looks like a nail. In 1933 Lysenko became codirector of the All-Union Selection and Genetics Institute, in Odessa, where he proposed to train a generation of “barefoot scientists” who would improve crops without worrying about what Lysenko considered to be the nuisance theories of genetics or natural selection. They could make seeds cold, and they would grow better in the cold; make seeds hot, and they would grow better in the heat. Lysenko came to argue that this approach was all that was necessary to improve Soviet agriculture. Plant breeding, genetics, and evolution were not necessary, nor was collecting seeds from far-flung environments. With his homespun story of becoming a scientist through work in the field rather than through formal education, and with his belief in improving crops through hard work and inspiration alone, Lysenko became the emblem of Soviet agriculture.
Lysenko held up his vernalized seeds and called for the end of genetics, much as a US senator might hold up a snowball and announce climate change to be a sham. In rewarding Lysenko with the position at the Odessa institute, Stalin had indicated clearly the direction in which he wished Soviet agriculture to go. Over time, Stalin’s government offered an increasing amount of support for Lysenko.
At first Vavilov, who appreciated the initial contribution made by Lysenko’s vernalization work, was supportive, too. Gradually he began to realize the extent of the threat posed by Lysenko, but he still seemed unable to believe it was real, much as scientists today struggle to come to the terms with the threat posed by the antiscience rhetoric of our leaders. He confronted Stalin, trying to present him with his science, trying to show him the scientific method, the beauty of genetics, and the flaws of Lysenko’s approach. Stalin was furious. He screamed at Vavilov that his excursions overseas were a waste of resources, that he should instead be spending his time learning from the “shock workers in the fields,” who were to shock the seeds with cold so as to improve them for the future. If Vavilov did not follow these instructions willingly, he would be made to follow them in other ways, as would all of Soviet agriculture. Lysenko, to varying degrees, would remain the unaccomplished hero of Soviet agriculture for decades. No one dared oppose him—no one but Vavilov.
On the first night Vavilov was imprisoned, Alexander Khvat came into his cell. Khvat was the investigator charged with extracting an admission from Vavilov, an admission that through his science he had become an enemy of the government, an agricultural spy on behalf of the British. Khvat started promptly upon entering Vavilov’s cell at 11:35 p.m. and did not stop until 2:30 the next morning. When Vavilov did not admit to the crimes of which he was accused, Khvat came back the next day. And the next. Khvat or one of several other interrogators visited Vavilov four hundred times—nearly two thousand hours of interrogation and torture. Vavilov had done nothing wrong, and so he had nothing to admit to, nor would he admit to things he had not done, at least initially. But Vavilov was no longer whole. He was sick. He was no longer able to stand. His fellow prisoners had to help him remove his boots from his swollen feet and roll him onto his back, where he could collapse. Eventually he broke. On August 24, 1940, Vavilov falsely confessed to being “a member of a right-wing anti-Soviet organization,” the Peasants Party of Labor.”5 He invented the organization in the hope that the fabricated admission would stop his torture. It did not. Vavilov was tortured more. He was tortured until he confessed that his fellow scientists, his friends, were also members of the same party. The one thing Vavilov did not renounce, even after he gave up his friends, including Leonid Govorov and Georgy Karpechenko, was his belief in science. In many hours of interrogations, Vavilov continued to deny the torturers’ assertions that modern science, Mendel and Darwin, were wrong.
On the basis of the confessions elicited during these terrible hours and the handful of supposedly damning artifacts from among his possessions, Vavilov was found guilty of espionage and anti-Soviet behavior. The punishment was decided on July 9, 1941. It was to be death by firing squad, along with the confiscation of all his possessions. Vavilov was fifty-six. He had two sons, a wife, and an ex-wife. He also had the largest collection of agriculturally important seeds in the world, the largest collection ever gathered, along with new crop varieties that those seeds had been used to breed. What would happen to all he had done? What would happen to his seeds? To his family? To the people in his employ?
Vavilov formally petitioned for a pardon. The pardon was denied. But in the days before he was to be sent to Butyrskaya prison to be executed, the Germans surrounded Leningrad, where Vavilov had stored most of his seeds and where he happened to be kept (little did his colleagues know). Moscow, too, was threatened. As a result, on October 24, Vavilov and the other prisoners were taken to eastern cities, to distance them from the war front. Vavilov was imprisoned in Saratov, Prison No. 1, on Astrakhan Street, in the same city in which he had begun his career as a professor.6
Vavilov lived on in prison, his will still present if diminished. He lived in a small basement cell with no window, a cell he shared with two other men. It had a light on all day, all night. It had one table and one bed. Two men slept on the bed, one on the table. They took turns. Vavilov gave lectures to the men about botany, they about their own fields. He also wrote a book, he would later tell a young woman whom he met in the prison, about “the history of worldwide agriculture.” He had also finished a large work on plant breeding and plant diseases. These are likely to have been, assuming Vavilov’s mind had not deteriorated, two of the most important books on agriculture and plants ever written. Somehow he had found a pencil and paper.
Meanwhile, Vavilov’s wife, Elena Ivanovna Barulina, and their son, Yury, did not know where he was. Nor did Vavilov know where his family was. The extra tragedy in these dual mysteries, if any need be added to this story, is that by coincidence Vavilov’s wife and son Yury had been evacuated from Moscow to Saratov, the same town in which he was imprisoned. They walked near the building in which he was housed.
On January 26, 1943, weakened by hardship and dysentery, Vavilov died of hunger and scurvy after more than a year of eating little other than kasha, salted fish, and more kasha.7 The man who, in all of history, most eagerly fought for the diversity of crops died because of its absence.
Not long after Vavilov’s death, his brother, Sergei, who had become an eminent scientist himself and had worked on Stalin’s nuclear project, visited Leningrad. He saw Nikolai’s apartment, which Stalin’s men had, by then, long ago cleared out. A ballerina, Natalia Dudinskaya, was now living in it, practicing her dance steps on same floor where Vavilov had so often arranged his seeds, her feet arcing through the dust of their remains. Sergei also visited the institute, where the smells of human death and musty grain hung in the air. He looked around at his brother’s seeds, still capable of germination. He felt raw and defeated and could not help but wonder why only seeds and not souls could be brought back from within those walls.
Despite the tragedy in Leningrad, despite the tragedy of Vavilov, his seeds made it through the siege. At war’s end, almost all of most of the crop varieties Vavilov and his team had collected remained; many of them were replanted in the Soviet Union right after the war. In their growth, the seeds had the potential to offer a heroic conclusion to the tragedies, a rebirth and a memorial. But would they?
The immediate challenges were great. In the aftermath of the war, Soviet agricultural research, in ecologist and writer Gary Nabhan’s words, ground to a halt. Most of the seed varieties Vavilov had brought back had not yet been tried in the field, nor would they be.
Breeding according to the insights of genetics and evolution stopped. Soviet textbooks were altered so as to reflect Lysenko’s views. University courses, too. Not only did Vavilov die, so did work in the Soviet Union on modern genetics and evolutionary biology. As a result, Soviet agriculture actually moved backwards until the death of Stalin, in 1953. (Lysenko did not die until 1976, a reminder of the incredible recentness of this story.) Even after Stalin died, however, the recovery was not immediate. Soviet genetics, particularly as related to agriculture, lost three decades. In 1972, the Soviet Union bought four hundred million bushels of wheat from the United States, unable to supply its own people. The wheat was of a hard red winter variety originally grown in Russia. Some argue that the negative effect of Lysenko and Stalin on agriculture played the single largest role in the fall of Soviet Communism.8
In subsequent decades, however, thanks to dedicated scientists and staff, Vavilov’s seeds, at least, survived. More than once, they just barely survived. They helped usher in advances in Russian agriculture, especially in the north. The northern distributions of corn, cotton, rice, soybeans, sorghum, tea, and pulses (beans and other legumes) in Russia have all increased, thanks to work based on Vavilov’s collections. New varieties of crops were planted at research stations and then spread from farm to farm around particular regions. Other accomplishments were made possible thanks to the work of those who continued Vavilov’s mission. More than four hundred of the varieties of crops that Vavilov collected or bred are now growing in fields across Russia. Four-fifths (which is to say nearly all) of the land in Russia is sown with seeds collected by Vavilov and/or his institute.9 Their benefits vary by region but perhaps are greatest in those regions where crop yields were unpredictable from year to year, where families lived from hardship to hardship. It is estimated that thanks to the wheat varieties Vavilov brought to Russia, the annual production of wheat increased by 80 percent relative to what it was at the time of his death. This is to say nothing of other crops.
But Vavilov’s mission was global. And to some extent, having garnered seeds from around the world, the responsibility of Vavilov’s institute was also global. Yet no one has provided a concrete estimate of Vavilov’s global contribution. Those who save seeds on behalf of the future tend to be poor at measuring what they have done. They share selflessly. They “fall on their seeds” on behalf of people they don’t know, assuming that someone else will do the same and that those seeds might be passed on not for just a few years but for a few millennia or more. They assume they are doing something for posterity. As a result, it is hard to sum up the value of such collections, hard to know what to count or when to stop counting. What, collectively, are they worth? What, even, is the value of Vavilov’s collection to the Russian economy and people? How much is it worth in terms of continued funding each year? These estimates need to be made but haven’t. Informally, those who gather seeds suggest that the answer is incalculably grand, worth dying for. But that very incalculableness has made it easy for governments to refrain from further investment, not only in Russia but also around the world.
Estimating the value of Vavilov’s work is all the more difficult because to do so well would require telling the story of each seed that passed through Vavilov’s hands and into the hands of others. For example, one variety of potato collected by Vavilov was taken to Hungary by Dr. István Sárvári. Sárvári used it to breed new varieties of potatoes resistant both to late blight and various viruses. His work paid off: some of the potatoes were resistant to both. Some of those resistant varieties were grown in Romania, where Scottish scientists encountered the potatoes in 1992. They negotiated a deal with the Sárvári family. Now the potatoes are being grown in the UK and elsewhere, sold as Sarpo potatoes. This entire chain of events was made possible by Vavilov’s work and the work to save the potatoes during the siege of Leningrad. How many other such chains might there be?
But even the collections themselves (and the work of many thousands of farmers from around the world they build on) and their subsequent breeding are only part of what Vavilov contributed to the world. What lasts may be different from what was intended—in this case, what lasts may be inspiration. Vavilov’s seed collection was not the first, but it was the largest and the first of its kind to explicitly attempt to conserve crop varieties from each of the major regions in which crops were domesticated and then to use them to breed new, useful forms. Many collections would follow this lead, sometimes directly. Vavilov persuaded the great botanist John Hawkes, for example, to take some of his potatoes back with him to England. Hawkes did. Hawkes, in turn, trained Carlos Ochoa, who went on to play a central role in the International Potato Center and its collections in Peru.
Where collections existed before Vavilov, his influence changed how they worked, their scope and grandeur. Abraham Lincoln established the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1862, in large part to collect seeds and distribute them among farmers. In 1898, the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction was added to the USDA; this office focused even more intently on getting seeds from around the world to farmers, shipping millions of packages a year. But it was not until after Vavilov’s death that this collection was coupled with the establishment of large seed banks and experimental farms where seeds from those seed banks could be planted and crossed with other seeds. It was then that the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation, including the National Small Grains Collection, was established in Fort Collins, Colorado. Vavilov’s legacy is similar in other regions. His work led to the origination or expansion of nearly every other major seed collection in the world.
Among those directly influenced by Vavilov was Harry Harlan. While working for the US Department of Agriculture, Harlan traveled the world searching for new crop varieties, particularly varieties of barley, his specialty. It was during this search that Harlan and Vavilov became friends. Harlan helped Vavilov on his expeditions through North America and hosted him. The two sat in Harlan’s living room and talked long into the night. On the floor or sitting in the corner during these conversations—stories of traveling the world, sagas about saving seeds—was Jack Harlan, Harry’s son. Jack grew up breathing Vavilov’s dream as if it were the ordinary sort of air everyone inhaled. So it was not surprising to Harry when, at the age of fifteen, Jack announced that he wanted to work with Vavilov. He planned to travel to Russia as soon as he could. It could have been a passing desire, but it was not. By the time he was in college, Jack Harlan was ever more dedicated to going to Russia. He even studied Russian at George Washington University while working on his bachelor of science degree to make such a visit possible. But when the time came, things had already gotten bad for Vavilov in Russia. Vavilov told Harlan’s father, on his last visit to the United States, in 1932, that he would communicate in code whether it was safe for Jack to visit. If Vavilov began a letter, “My Dear Dr. Harlan,” it was not safe to visit. If Vavilov began, “Dear Dr. Harlan,” it was. Jack wrote a letter to Vavilov in the spring of 1937 asking to visit. He soon thereafter received a reply that began, “My Dear Dr. Harlan.” Russia, it seemed, was not safe.
Jack Harlan did not go to Russia, but he did go on to a career studying the evolution of crop plants at the University of Illinois. Inspired by Vavilov, he collected and saved everything he could, even if it seemed useless. For instance, when visiting a wheat field in remote eastern Turkey, Harlan and his Turkish colleague, Osman Tosun, found “a miserable looking wheat, tall, thin-stemmed,”10 and otherwise uninspiring. It broke in the wind. Worse yet, it seemed susceptible to leaf rust and lacked winter hardiness. And oh, by the way, it was also terrible for baking. But Harlan collected it anyway and entered it into his American collection of seeds—his germplasm collection.
In 1963, stripe rust was killing wheat across the northwestern United States. Breeders were searching for something resistant. They tried many different varieties, including PI 178383, the name given to the seeds from Harlan’s trip to Turkey. Fortunately, the breeders found that PI 178383 was able to fight off stripe rust as well as many varieties of four other pathogens. PI 178383, that “miserable looking wheat,” has now had its genes bred into the most common wheat grown in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. It saved farmers from many millions of dollars in crop losses. But the legacy of Jack Harlan would be something else, something more grand. Jack Harlan was the one who reconsidered Vavilov’s centers of origin, both to expand upon and improve them. Jack Harlan, too, would become, more than anyone else, the advocate for a particular part of Vavilov’s vision. Vavilov was aware that crop varieties were being lost, but it was Jack Harlan who would sound the clarion call that saving the diversity of seeds was not just useful but also something that needed to be done immediately, before it was too late.
Today geographers and anthropologists often talk about the traditional knowledge of peoples indigenous to particular places. Long before the words traditional knowledge were used, Vavilov understood the value of such knowledge. He learned many languages not because he could but because it seemed necessary in order to learn what various peoples knew about their crops and how to farm them.
The last twelve thousand years of agriculture have yielded an extraordinary diversity of crops. But the process of that flowering was slow and depended heavily on chance as a key element in the process. Mutation produced new versions of genes, and sex mixed those versions among offspring. Together, mutation and sex yielded variety, just as they had for the previous billion years of evolution. The role of farmers was to choose among the varieties, winnowing, favoring, and sharing favored forms. The modern synthesis offered a way to speed things up by strategically crossing crops rather than depending on chance. This new approach, Vavilov imagined, would move into the future, coupled with the movement of traditional varieties, the conservation of traditional knowledge, and the conservation of the process of creating those traditional varieties. In other words, he would add to, not replace, the old ways.
It was in the United States, however, that attempts to use traditional varieties of crops to breed new varieties most took hold, albeit in a particularly American way. Rather than try to produce new varieties that might grow anywhere, American scientists would come to focus on using pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, and irrigation to make conditions as similar as possible everywhere and then to breed crops ideally suited to those conditions. This approach would come to depend disproportionately on one man, a man who both built on Vavilov’s legacy and, as Jack Harlan would point out, set the stage for its destruction.