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Gary Paul Nabhan: The Vavilov Legacy is Alive and Well
October 30th, 2008 by Gary Paul Nabhan
http://blog.islandpress.org/217/gary-paul-nabhan-the-vavilov-legacy-is-alive-and-well

When I arrived at the National Agricultural Library just outside Washington 
D.C. one noon this October, a white-haired man with a commanding presence 
stood at the security check, impeccably dressed in an elegant suit, while his 
translator explained to the guard that he would be the guest of honor for an 
event that afternoon. When he turned around to speak with his translator, I 
noticed that he had the same high brow and combed-back hair that the world’s 
greatest plant explorer had exhibited more than three quarters of a century 
ago, when that scientist made his last visit to the United States. The man in 
the security line in front of me was none other than Dr. Yuri Vavilov, the 
only surviving son of Dr. Nikolay Vavilov, whose legacy was being honored 
that day at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “intellectual seed bank,” as 
many call the great library in which we stood.

Although a half dozen of us spoke that afternoon about seed banks and the 
conservation of biodiversity in the field, Yuri Vavilov clearly stole the 
show. He astounded us by opting to give his speech in English, rather than 
relying on the talents of the very capable young translator who accompanied 
him. He spoke with pride of his fathers’ accomplishments as both a scientist 
and a visionary in the realms of agricultural science and geographic 
exploration. But he also spoke with pain in his voice while recalling his 
childhood during World War II in Saratov, Russia, where unbeknownst to him 
and his mother, his father lay dying of starvation in one of Stalin’s gulags 
just a few miles away. In carefully-chosen words, he went so far as to 
criticize the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Alexandr Solsenitzen (spelling) 
for implying that his uncle Sergey-another great scientist who contributed to 
Nobel Prize-winning physics research—was an unwitting accomplice to Stalin by 
letting his brother be jailed, and not earlier seeking to clear his name.

Near the end of the program, as I presented my photos of Nikolay Vavilov’s 
oldest surviving student, Dr. Amaik Dzangaliev—champion of the wild apple 
forests of Central Asia—Yuri Vavilov rose to his feet and sweetly told us his 
story of meeting this protégé of his father in Kazakhstan many years before. 
And then, he pulled from his briefcase a copy of a book of his own research 
books translated into Kazakh, as a gift! He later told me that if I should 
ever visit Almaty, Kazakhstan again, I should stroll down Vavilov Boulevard 
where apples have been planted to commemorate his father’s recognition of the 
coevolution of apples and Kazakh cultures along the Silk Road. And he ended 
his remarks by noting that the story of his father’s rise and tragic fall 
could only be compared to the stuff of Greek Tragedies.

What the rest of the presenters did that day was to try to assure Yuri that 
his father’s legacy was in no way forgotten; in fact, it was alive as it had 
been in decades. Two major books about his father had appeared in English in 
the last year, and a website from Bioversity International cleverly features 
a “travel blog” as if Nikolay Vavilov were still on the road, making field 
reports, and collecting seeds to this day. Major conservation organizations 
such as World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and Conservation 
International now use as their primary tools for global conservation planning 
a series of maps of hotspots of wild biodiversity which build on Vavilov’s 
own map of centers of crop diversity first sketched out more than eight 
decades ago. While the staff of nearly every major seed bank in the world 
exhibits a photo of Vavilov’s historic visits to their country, farmers and 
activists shaping in situ conservation reserves for still-diverse farmlands 
are also paying attention to Vavilov’s notes and photos as means to gauge 
environmental and agricultural change in their foodsheds.

That evening, as Yuri Vavilov shared dinners with several of his admirers and 
friends, I could see the pleasure in his face as the party remembered not 
merely his father, but his father’s friends as well: Theodosius Dobzansky, 
the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist; Jack Hawkes, the recently-deceased potato 
expert; Harry Harlan, the barley breeder and confidante; and Jack Harlan, 
Harry’s son, who once canoed with Vavilov out to see wild rice in a stream 
not all that far from the restaurant where we ate.

After withstanding the pain of the forty year period during which mention of 
his father’s legacy was banished from history and science books in Russia, 
Yuri Vavilov appeared to accept the belated recognition by the world that his 
father was one of the most original minds ever to be concerned with plant 
conservation and agricultural geography. If justice was fully done, his 
father would be as well known to American gardeners and farmers-and to all 
other food producers, for that matter—as Charles Darwin, Gregory Mendel, 
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington Carver, and Luther Burbank.
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Gary Paul Nabhan is a world-renowned ethnobiologist, conservationist, and 
essayist. He is the author of the new book, Where Our Food Comes From: 
Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine.

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