Papers Related to the Translation of "Five Continents" by Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1943) was a noted Russian botanist and geneticist. He was born into the family of a merchant in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1910. From 1911 to 1912, Vavilov did practical work at the Bureau for Applied Botany and at the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology of the Agricultural Scientific Committee. He traveled in Europe from 1913 to 1914, studying plant immunity with William Bateson, a British biologist and co-founder of the science of genetics.

In 1917, Vavilov became a professor of agronomy at the University of Saratov, and was elected head of the Department of Applied Botany in 1920. The department was transformed into the Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops in 1924, and served as the central institution responsible for collecting plants of the world and studying them for purposes of plant breeding. Vavilov participated in over 100 collecting missions. These plant hunting missions led to Vavilov's major concepts of evolutionary genetics, the law of homologous series in variation (1920) and the theory of the centers of origin of cultivated plants (1926).

Vavilov’s modern scientific theories were criticized by Trofim Lysenko, a biologist who had the support of Joseph Stalin. By the early 1930s, Vavilov’s scientific programs began to lose government support. He came under pressure from the Soviet state and was arrested in August 1940 while on an expedition to Ukraine. He was sentenced to death in July 1941, but his sentence was later commuted to twenty years imprisonment. Vavilov died in prison at Saratov in 1943.