In the former Soviet Union, there was a plant geneticist like "Yuan Longping". He spent 24 years collecting more than 250,000 seeds of cultivated crops and established the largest seed gene bank in the world at that time; his genetic variation The law of homologous series and the central theory of the origin of cultivated plants have become the theoretical basis for the collection of plant germplasm resources, introduction and domestication, and hybrid breeding . Together with Mendel and Morgan's law of inheritance, breeding has become a correct theory. The science of guidance; the All-Soviet Crop Cultivation Research Institute he led was responsible for World War II During the Battle of Leningrad, nine geneticists would rather starve to death and insist on guarding seeds weighing several tons..., he is Nikolai· Ivanovich Vavilov.
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, the former Soviet Union's "Yuan Longping" who devoted his life to eradicating hunger, was unjustly imprisoned and starved to death.
Having seen hunger, he devoted his life to eradicating hunger
In 1887, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was born in a poor rural area in Russia, the second eldest child in his family. At that time, the Tsar's militarism caused frequent famines in Russia. Vavilov, who had witnessed the fragility of his life in the face of hunger since he was a child, knew the importance of food. Fortunately, his father, Sr. Vavilov, was good at business and his family was well-off enough to ensure the education of his children. Therefore, all four of Vavilov’s brothers and sisters entered institutions of higher learning. The elder sister later made outstanding contributions in microbiology and the medical field. , and his physicist brother Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov also served as the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Former Soviet biogeneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov
As for Nikolai Vavilov, at the age of 19 in 1906, he was admitted to the Agricultural College of Moscow University and stayed there after graduation. He teaches at the school and is engaged in research on cereal crop variety resources. Starting in 1913, he studied at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and the Collège Vermoulin in France, where he was taught by the geneticist Punnet and the famous wheat breeder Biffin. It was during this period that Vavilov began to study the world's wheat varieties. Perform immunological studies.
In 1920, Vavilov began to lead the All-Soviet Crop Cultivation Research Institute and carry out comprehensive scientific investigations.
Specimens collected by Vavilov
After returning to the country in 1920, with the support of Lenin, Vavilov began to lead the All-Soviet Institute of Applied Plants and New Crops (renamed the All-Soviet Institute of Crop Cultivation in 1930). Vavilov began to carry out comprehensive scientific expeditions. In the 24 years from 1916 to 1940, Vavilov learned 15 languages, conducted 180 scientific expeditions in more than 50 countries and regions around the world, and obtained more than 250,000 pieces of seed material. , including 36,000 portions of wheat, 10,022 portions of corn, 23,636 portions of beans, 23,200 portions of grass, 17,955 portions of vegetables, and 12,650 portions of fruit trees. As a result, Vavilov is also known as "the world's greatest plant explorer".
The world's eight major crop origin centers in Vavilov's theory of origin centers of cultivated plants.
Corn samples in Vavilov’s office
The world’s first seed gene bank
The reason why Vavilov collected a large number of crop varieties is that his research on plant immunology found that the problem of plant diversity Facing serious challenges, in addition to academically contributing to the "Law of Homology Series of Genetic Variation" and "Central Theory of the Origin of Cultivated Plants" in plant genetics and plant geography, which became the guiding theory of breeding, he also used more than 20 years of The tons of seeds collected established the world's first and largest seed gene bank in Leningrad at that time. These seeds not only provided valuable materials for cytology , genetics analysis and hybrid breeding, but also preserved a large number of Excellent crop genes.
The entrance to the Global Plant Seed Vault deep in Svalbard, Norway.
The International Seed Vault was supported by the Food and Agriculture Program of the United Nations and was put into use in 2008 at a cost of US$9 million. It stores "backup seeds" from all over the world for free.
Speaking of seed gene banks, here is an additional extension to talk about the global plant seed bank located deep in Svalbard, Norway, so that everyone can understand the importance of seed banks to human food security. The Svalbard Islands are only 1,120 kilometers away from the North Pole, far away from the common "natural and man-made disasters" in the world. The Svalbard Seed Vault was built here and was supported by the Food and Agriculture Program of the United Nations. It cost 9 million US dollars and was invested in 2008. Use, store "backup seeds" from around the world for free.
Transporting new seeds into the Svalbard Seed Gene Bank
Qualified seeds selected from various countries are sealed in special three-layer aluminum foil bags and transported to Svalbard. They pass through the security inspection system at the airport and are then sent to the seed bank.
has currently stored more than 1 million seeds, including 860,000 seed backups of wheat, barley, lentils, mung beans, chickpeas, sorghum, peas, potatoes, etc., with more than 4,000 species, all of which humans depend on for survival. Crop seeds, including Chinese rice and vegetables. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is built in a cave under frozen soil and thick rocks at an altitude of 131 meters. The temperature is always maintained at -18°C. In a constant temperature environment of low temperature and low humidity, seeds of wheat, barley and other crops can be stored for more than 1,000 years. It can still germinate, and sorghum can even be stored for 19,500 years. The
seed bank classifies seed samples, indicating their variety, provenance, age and other information, and transcribes them to a scientific information website. The picture shows North Korean seeds.
Entering from the gate is a 120-meter-long tunnel that goes deep into the sandstone mountain and leads directly to three independent seed warehouses that are 45 meters long, 4 meters wide and 4 meters high. The
seed bank is 120 meters long and covers an area of about 1,000 square meters. It has three storage rooms and can accommodate 4.5 million seeds. As the world's largest crop seed bank, it is equipped with five explosion-proof hatches from the gate to the seed storage warehouse. Its safety is comparable to that of the American gold storage warehouse, and it is enough to withstand earthquakes with a magnitude of 6.2 on the Richter scale and nuclear weapons attacks. The operating principle of the seed bank is similar to that of a bank vault. Countries around the world can send qualified seeds to the seed bank for storage. Seed bank engineers cannot open any seeds in any country. Only the depositing country can withdraw the stored seeds.
The Svalbard Seed Bank is not the only seed bank in the world. There are 1,700 large and small "seed banks" around the world, run by different countries and organizations.
The exhibition hall of Kunming Biological Seed Resource Library has many acrylic rods installed on one wall, and several seeds are embedded in each rod, forming a seed world.
For example, in 2015, due to the Syrian civil war, the seed bank in Aleppo was bombed, so Syria extracted drought-tolerant seeds from the Svalbard National Seed Bank and returned them to China for reuse, and re-selected them the next year. Qualified seeds are sent back to Svalbard for storage. This is also the first case of seeds being withdrawn from the International Seed Bank since it was put into use in 2008, which fully illustrates the necessity of the seed bank as "Noah's Ark in the plant world". Of course, in Kunming, China, there is also the largest wild plant seed bank in Asia and the second largest in the world.
The Russian Seed Bank located in St. Petersburg was formerly the All-Soviet Crop Cultivation Institute seed bank founded by Vavilov.
During the 872 days that Leningrad was besieged by Nazi Germany, a total of 642,000 people died of starvation and freezing, and 21,000 people died from German air raids and shelling.
It is precisely the special value of the seed bank that during the Battle of Leningrad in World War II in 1944, although the 872-day siege cost the Soviet Union 3.43 million casualties, a large number of soldiers and civilians in the city died of starvation and disease, and even " The tragedy of "exchanging children and eating them"... In such a desperate atmosphere, scientists at the All-Soviet Institute of Crop Cultivation, where Vavilov worked, still guarded 260,000 seeds weighing several tons that could be eaten to survive. Nine plant geneticists starved to death. These seeds There are many genes that are resistant to specific pests and diseases, which have led to the creation of many hybrid crops we use today.
In 1942, during the siege of Leningrad, children were starved to the point of becoming emaciated.
The siege destroyed water, energy and food supplies, triggering the Great Famine in Leningrad, killing up to 1.5 million people, and evacuating more than 1.4 million civilians and soldiers
Among them were peanut expert Alexander Shchukin and botanist Demi Terry Ivanov and others, and Vavilov, as the founder of this seed gene bank, was unjustly imprisoned on charges of British espionage without trial due to the betrayal and political struggle of his student Lysenko in 1941, and was sentenced to death. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but he was starved to death in Saratov prison two years later on January 26, 1943. However, the news of Vavilov’s death was not reported at that time, so his colleagues at the institute Still guarding the seed gene bank in a desperate situation, and paid the price with his life.
The Great Purge of 1937 to 1938 was the period of the Soviet Union's "Great Terror" during which 1.3 million people were sentenced, 682,000 of whom were shot.
The Soviet counter-revolutionary movement caused the Soviet party, government, military, scientific and cultural circles to lose a large number of outstanding backbones, and socialism lost an opportunity for self-improvement.
The " Lysenko Incident"
The "Lysenko Incident" mentioned here not only caused Vavilov to die unjustly, but also affected the agricultural development and genetics research of the Soviet Union. Profound. Lysenko was originally just a breeder in Azerbaijan . After accidentally discovering the "vernalization treatment" breeding method, he got Vavilov's attention and was promoted. However, Lysenko's promotion of vernalization technology did not rely on strict scientific experiments, but resorted to exaggeration and deception. Therefore, he was criticized by many scientists, including Vavilov. At this time, the Soviet Union was undergoing the "Great Purge".
Lysenko, who had a good political sense, seized the opportunity and vigorously promoted the genetic theories of Lamarck and Michurin, which were recognized by the Soviet Union and Stalin, and were reused.
Lysenko, the so-called "Chief Scientist of the Soviet Union", not only had wild ideas, but was also adept at playing politics and evil methods.
Lysenko, who had a good sense of politics, seized the opportunity to vigorously promote the genetic theories of Lamarck and Michurin, which were recognized by the Soviet Union and Stalin. , and regarded the Western biological genetic theory developed based on Mendel-Morgan's theory as "the enemy of the Soviet people." Just because Morgan's genetic theory believes that "the mutation of species is random and uncontrollable" is inconsistent with the Soviet philosophy of "not only explaining the world, but also transforming it, and does not allow probability and random occurrence." As a result, Lysenko was reused by Stalin and became the actual leader of agricultural science in the Soviet Union.
In 1951, the Commercial Press published the book "The Application of Lysenko's Vernalization Method". After Lysenko came to power, although the vernalization breeding he presided over caused a great famine in Ukraine, it was interpreted as "Western capitalism." conspiracy", and defined the scientists who opposed Lysenko as "attacking the Soviet system and Soviet peasants with ulterior motives" in the manner of "class enemies", and separated their own biology from Vavilov's biology. The controversy was likened to "the struggle between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks", and political means were used to expel, arrest, imprison, exile, and shoot a large number of biogeneticists, including Vavilov.
Before Lysenko dominated Soviet biological genetics, the development level of Soviet genetics was not inferior to that of European and American countries.
Lysenko's theory became the guiding ideology of Soviet biology and reached its peak after the "August Meeting" in 1948. Because that year, Morgan genetics, which was contrary to Lysenko's theory, was banned. Three thousand people in the Soviet Union Many geneticists have lost their jobs in universities and scientific research institutions and have been persecuted to varying degrees. But Lysenko's personal victory is undoubtedly a scientific tragedy. This catastrophe also caused the biogenetics of the Soviet Union to lag behind that of Western European and American countries by two generations . It was not until the fall of Khrushchev in 1964 that the influence of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union finally came to an ignominious end.
A commemorative stamp issued on the 100th anniversary of the birth of former Soviet plant geneticist Vavilov.
Vavilov, the plant geneticist who devoted his life to the research of wheat, corn and other cereals that support the world's population, was completely rehabilitated and restored to his reputation two years after Stalin's death. The All-Soviet Institute of Crop Cultivation, the All-Soviet Association of Genetics and Breeding, the Institute of Genetics, and the Saratov Agricultural College were all named after Vavilov. Later, it was named after Vavilov, the younger brother of the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Sergey. Vavilov together named an asteroid to commemorate this star of plant genetics who fell in the dark.
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov may not have been heard of by many people, but that is only because the Soviet Union where he lived has been included in history textbooks.
This is Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, the "Yuan Longping" of the former Soviet Union. Perhaps many people have never heard of him, but that is only because the Soviet Union where he lived has been included in the history textbooks. To this day, the All-Soviet Crop Cultivation Research Institute named after Vavilov still preserves the genetic seed bank preserved at that time and continues to make its own contribution to the cause of eliminating human hunger.
Review of the previous issue: From famine relief grain to brewing raw material, what has happened to sorghum originating from the Ethiopian Plateau in Africa in China?
Note: This article is only the opinion of one family, welcome to correct and forward. In addition, some of the pictures in this article are quoted from the Internet. If there is any copyright private link, please delete it.
