North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Betty Mayfield <bmayfield@opusnet.com>]

To the list,

Apparently underfunding of the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry 
has been going on for some time, according to an article by Gabrielle 
Strobel in Science News, Dec. 18, 1993, which said the institute was 
operating on a shoestring.

And other dangers were faced.

"Some of the institute's riches have vanished already. Before the 
breakup of the Soviet Union, the Vavilov network consisted of 19 
experimental stations, six of them located outside Russia. One of 
these, the Sukhumi station in Georgia's contested western province of 
Abkhazia, was destroyed in this year's [1993] civil war.

"Alexey Fogel, an 83-year-old botanist and 50-year veteran of the 
Sukhumi station, rescued seeds as he fled Abkhazia through mountain 
paths in the Caucasus range, says Sergey Alexanian, a spokesman for 
the Vavilov institute. Fogel, his son Vladimir, also a scientist at 
the Sukhumi station, and two other botanists succeeded in evacuating 
226 precious samples of subtropical fruit plants and almost the 
entire lemon collection to the Russian town of Sochi.

"There the samples will be kept permanently, hopes Alexanian, 
provided the Russian government absorbs the cost. The institute does 
not plan to move them to the St. Petersburg collection because the 
city's climate is not conducive to growing and studying subtropical 
plants. The 2,000 samples left behind in the Sukhumi station are 
probably spoiled, Alexanian says."

Betty Mayfield
northwest Oregon