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."