Publications /  The Potato, Treasure of the Andes
From Agriculture to Culture

Vavilov's interest in plants can be traced to his early childhood in Moscow, where he was born in 1887. According to his biographer, Barry Mendel Cohen (1990), Vavilov organized his first collection of plant specimens while he was still a boy.

After graduating from Russia's Agricultural Institute and studying for several years in Europe, the young scientist was appointed Head of the Department of Applied Botany at the Scientific Committee in Petrograd (today St. Petersburg). He worked there as a biologist, botanist and geneticist through World War I, the Russian Revolution and the turbulent early years of the Soviet Union, transforming the department into the world's foremost crop research center, the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry.

Vavilov was part scientist, part adventurer and part diplomat. Between 1916-1940, he carried out more than 100 plant-collecting missions in 64 countries. He explored Africa and Asia, and traveled to uncharted areas of the Andes and the Himalayas. Over roughly two decades, and under his leadership, his institute collected more than 200,000 seed samples.

As the Soviet Union became increasingly totalitarian under Josef Stalin, government authorities grew wary of the work of Vavilov and his followers. Claiming that genetics promoted a belief in "inborn class differences," in the 1930s the regime began purging scientists. Vavilov fell out of favor until he was finally arrested in 1940.

Vavilov's students continued his work after his arrest. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the early 1940s, several of Vavilov's colleagues preferred to starve to death during the siege rather than eat samples from the seed collections they were guarding. Vavilov himself died in prison, most likely of starvation, in 1943.

Vavilov's greatest scientific contribution was his theory on the -centers of origin- of plants. The amount of diversity of a crop in a given area, Vavilov maintained, was a good indication of how long that crop had been grown there. Rejecting the long-held belief that agriculture was born in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, Vavilov postulated that the world's crops had originated in eight distinct centers of origin - all located near high mountain ranges.

In Ethiopia he found hundreds of varieties of wheat, and in a small village outside Guadalajara, Mexico, he discovered more varieties of maize than had been found in all of North America. It was Vavilov who proposed that the potato originated in the Peruvian Andes, a theory that has held to this day.

Lucien O. Chauvin