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nafex - [NAFEX] Earlier Russian trouble

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  • From: Betty Mayfield <bmayfield@opusnet.com>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>, North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [NAFEX] Earlier Russian trouble
  • Date: Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:49:54 -0700

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





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