The impact hypothesis - III

The Alvarezes wrote up the results from their tests and sent them, along with their proposed explanation, to Science. Their paper, “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction,” was published in June 1980. An asteroid six miles wide collided with the earth sixty-five million years ago. (The date was later revised to 66 mya.) Exploding on contact, it released energy of more than a million of the most powerful H-bombs ever tested. Debris, including iridium from the pulverized asteroid, spread around the globe. 

Sunlight disappeared and temperatures plunged and a mass extinction ensued. The Alvarezes proposed that the main cause of the K-T mass extinction was not the impact itself or even the immediate aftermath. The truly catastrophic effect of the asteroid was the dust which spread around the globe and shut out the sunlight and blocked photosynthesis in plants. In the intervening decades, this account has been subjected to numerous refinements. 

It generated lots of excitement, much of it beyond the bounds of paleontology. In the context of “hard-core uniformitarianism,” the impact hypothesis was worse than wrong — it couldn’t have happened. A few years later, an informal survey was conducted among paleontologists. A majority thought some sort of cosmic collision might have taken place. But only one in twenty thought it had anything to do with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Among professional paleontologists, the Alvarezes’ idea and in many cases the Alvarezes themselves were reviled.

But evidence for the hypothesis continued to accumulate. First was tiny grains of rock known as “shocked quartz.” Under high magnification, shocked quartz exhibits what look like scratch marks caused by high pressure that deform the crystal structure. Shocked quartz was first noted at nuclear test sites and later found near impact craters. In 1984, grains of shocked quartz were discovered in a layer of clay from the K-T boundary in eastern Montana. 

It occurred to Walter Alvarez that if there had been a giant, impact-induced tsunami, it would have left behind a distinctive "fingerprint" in the sedimentary record. He scanned the records of thousands of sediment cores that had been drilled in the oceans, and found such a "fingerprint" in cores from the Gulf of Mexico (oops! Gulf of America). Finally, a hundred-mile-wide crater was discovered beneath the Yucatán Peninsula buried under half a mile of newer sediment. 

This crater had shown up in gravity surveys taken in the nineteen-fifties by Mexico’s state-run oil company. When Walter located the cores in 1991 and examined them, they were found to contain a layer of glass—rock that had melted, then rapidly cooled at the K-T boundary. To the Alvarez camp, this

was the conclusive proof that they required about there having been an asteroid impact.  It was enough to move many uncommitted scientists to support the impact hypothesis. By this time, Luis Alvarez had died of complications from esophageal cancer. The crater became more widely known, after the nearest town, as the Chicxulub crater.

When the Alvarezes had published their hypothesis, they knew of only three sites where the iridium layer was exposed. In the decades since, dozens more have been located. The confirmation of the impact hypothesis was a challenge to a uniformitarian viewpoint that basically every geologist and paleontologist had been trained in. 

On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out. The event’s most famous victims, the dinosaurs — or, to be more precise, the non-avian dinosaurs — suffered a hundred percent losses. Around two-thirds of the mammalian families living at the end of the Cretaceous disappear at the boundary. Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow survived the impact. 

Change one detail, and we can imagine a completely different world. If the asteroid had hit a moment earlier or later, it would have hit deep ocean instead of shallow seas, releasing far less toxic gas, and killing many fewer species. If the asteroid had been delayed by just one minute, it might have missed Earth entirely. An astrophysicist has proposed that tiny oscillations of the sun's orbit flung the asteroid from the distant Oort cloud toward our planet. But for one small vibration in an unfathomably distant reach of deep space, dinosaurs might have survived — and humans might never have existed. 

Natural Selection is often presented as a relentless improvement from worse to better. Richard Dawkins once said that “Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance." But evolution at times proceeds in an unpredictable fashion. This is obvious when you consider that the evolution of mammals only happened because of an asteroid strike. But we mostly hear about survival of the fittest not survival of the luckiest. 

The impact hypothesis - II

Enter Walter Alvarez. He came from a long line of distinguished scientists. His great-grandfather and grandfather were both noted physicians, and his father, Luis, was a physicist at the University of California-Berkeley. Walter attended graduate school at Princeton and took up geology. In the early 70s, he got a research post at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Alvarez decided to try to figure out, on the basis of plate tectonics, how the Italian peninsula had formed.

In this quest, he found himself working in a hill town of Gubbio, about a hundred miles north of Rome, with an Italian geologist who was an expert on foraminifera or “forams” for short. They are the tiny marine creatures that create little calcite shells which drift down to the ocean floor once the animal inside has died. They can only be seen with microscopes. The geologist drew Alvarez's attention to a curious sequence. 

In one centimeter of clay separating two limestone layers, there were no fossils at all. In the older layer that lay below the clay, the forams were much larger than in the younger layer above the clay. The same of distribution of forams above and below the clay layer was present everywhere he looked. What had caused such a change in the forams? How fast did it happen? These were the questions that puzzled Walter. The pursuit of these questions led him to one of the biggest discoveries about one of the most important days in the history of life.

First a brief description of Deep Time. The history of life is divided into three chapters called "eras". The first is called the Paleozoic (“ancient life”), the second the Mesozoic (“middle life”), and the third the Cenozoic (“new life”). Each era comprises several “periods”; the Mesozoic, for example, spans the Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous. The next period is the Tertiary (now renamed the Paleogene).

               Geological Time Scale 

The boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary layers, where the clay layer is found is called the K-T boundary. K is used as the abbreviation for Cretaceous because C was already taken by an earlier geological period known as the Carboniferous; today, the border is formally known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, boundary. It is a line that definitively marks the end-Cretaceous mass extinction everywhere in the world where the right aged rocks are preserved. It happened 66 mya (million years ago). 

                                                             KT (or KPg) boundary 

 Alvarez had been used to believing in uniformitarianism. He had learned that the disappearance of any group of organisms had to be a gradual process, with one species slowly dying out, then another, then a third, and so on. But the sequence in the Gubbio limestone gave him a different picture. The many species of forams in the lower layer seemed to disappear suddenly and all more or less at the same time. He also realized another thing. These forams appeared to vanish right around the point the last of the dinosaurs were known to have disappeared.

In 1977, Alvarez got a job at Berkeley, where his father, Luis, was working. He brought with him to California his samples from Gubbio. While Walter had been studying plate tectonics, Luis was busy winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. He’d also developed the first linear proton accelerator, invented a new kind of bubble chamber, designed several innovative radar systems, and codiscovered tritium.  In 2007 the American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century."

Luis Alvarez was interested in all sorts of riddles. An example was whether there were treasure-filled chambers inside Egypt’s second-largest pyramid. He would often come up with innovative ideas to approach the problem. When Walter told his father about the puzzling fossil distribution in Gubbio, Luis was fascinated. He came up with the wild idea of clocking the clay using the element iridium which is extremely rare on the surface of the earth. But Luis knew that it was much more common in meteorites. 

On earth, the tiny amounts of iridium come from bits of meteorites that are constantly raining down on the planet. Luis reasoned that the longer it had taken the clay layer to accumulate, the more cosmic dust would have fallen; thus the more iridium it would contain. By this technique he would be able to find out what length of time the clay layer represented. Walter gave him some limestone from above the clay layer, some from below it, and some of the clay itself. 

When the results came from the lab, it was puzzling. The amount of iridium that was present in the layers above and below the clay layer was what was normally present on earth. But the amount of iridium in the clay layer in the middle was 30 times higher. No one knew what to make of this. Was it a weird anomaly, or something more significant? Something very unusual, and very bad, had happened at the K-T boundary. The forams, the clay, the iridium, the dinosaurs, were all signs — but of what?

Two other sites having sediments dated to 66 mya when the Dinosaurs disappeared were found - one in  Denmark and another in New Zealand. They had the same pattern as the ones at Gubbio - a thin clay layer between earlier and later layers. They too showed an iridium “spike” in the clay layer. The Alvarezes knew they were onto something and started thinking up theories that would fit the available data. Finally, after almost a year’s worth of dead ends, they arrived at the impact hypothesis. 

The impact hypothesis - I

More than 99 percent all species that have ever lived on Earth have become extinct. For many people, when they think about extinction, they think about dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were huge terrestrial animals that lived during the period about 240 to 66 million years ago (called the Mesozoic Era). They had rich varieties in body size, shape and way of life. They ruled the Earth for more than 100 million years, till somehow they suddenly vanished on the Earth more than 65 million years ago. 

The mystery of the extinction of the Dinosaurs has been the focus of research and debate for long. Many different theories have been put forth as explanations. Some of the well-known ones include invoking climate change to which the dinosaurs could not adapt; continental drift causing climate change; flipping of earth’s magnetic poles leading to the dramatic changes of natural environment; acid rain leaching away important micronutrients; rodents eating dinosaur eggs as food; etc. 

The most commonly accepted explanation is that a meteor struck the earth 66 million years ago leading to a nuclear winter that led to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs (birds are accepted as having evolved from a branch of the dinosaurs). The rock slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula moving at something like forty-five thousand miles per hour. The asteroid blasted into the air more than fifty times its own mass in pulverized rock.

The resulting huge cloud of very hot vapor and debris raced over the North American continent incinerating anything in its path. Owing to the composition of the Yucatán Peninsula, the dust thrown up was rich in sulfur and particularly effective at blocking sunlight. After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multi-season “impact winter.” Forests were decimated. Marine ecosystems collapsed. And the non-avian dinosaurs died out. 

The interesting question is: how did scientists find out about a meteor-strike that happened all that long ago? Before that story, one needs to know about a clash between two schools of thought in evolutionary biology: uniformitarianism and catastrophism. 

In the opinion of uniformitarians like Darwin, the emergence and disappearance of species are the outcomes of natural evolution. When there is change in natural environment, the species is no longer able to adapt to the new environment and if there are no other proper places for migration, the population of the species will diminish till it becomes extinct. They believe that the emergence and disappearance of species is the effect of slow natural selection. The uniformitarian view denied sudden or sweeping change of any kind.

On the other hand, catastrophists believe that sudden, short-lived, and violent events lead to the extinction of many organisms. The leading scientific proponent of catastrophism in the early nineteenth century was the French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. He believed that the history of life on earth indicated that there had been several of these revolutions, like earthquakes and floods, which he viewed as recurring natural events, amid long intervals of stability. 

The more that was learned about the fossil record, the more difficult it was to explain the sudden disappearance and appearance of large numbers of species, which, according to Uniformitarians, should take millions of years. The Uniformitarians said that maybe the losses shown in the fossil record did constitute a “mass extinction.” But mass extinctions were not to be confused with “catastrophes.” They maintained that the fossil record was incomplete and the missing spans of time would eventually be found. 

In the war of words between the two groups, Uniformitarians held the upper hand for many decades. The feeling between the two groups was so bitter that Uniformitarians described catastrophism as 'evolution by jerks'. In retaliation, Catastrophists described Uniformitarianism as 'evolution by creeps'. Who said academics don’t have a sense of humour?

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - IV

What happened to Vavilov? It took many years for that story to emerge. After he was taken from Ukraine, he was subjected to brutal interrogation. Then he was put on a trial and found guilty of spying for the British, which was not true, and he was sentenced to death. So by the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Vavilov was no longer on the scene, he was in prison, awaiting execution. 

It's only because of the dedicated work of a Russian academic called Mark Popovsky in the 1960s that we even know that story. He managed to get access to the NKVD papers against all the odds, managed to write a book and smuggle it out of the Soviet Union. Popovsky became the first outsider to learn the story of how and why the security services arrested Vavilov, who informed on him, what sentence he received, and how and where he died. 

He recorded in detail how Vavilov had to face innumerable interrogations until the botanist agreed to collude in the fictional version of events that had been prepared for his confession. Then Popovsky began giving lectures, one of which he delivered at the seed bank itself.  The informers whom he mentioned by name jumped up and left the hall to the hissing and jeers of their colleagues. Then he published an article in which he described the three years leading up to Vavilov's arrest, and Trofim Lysenko’s role in these events. 

This mild provocation made the state issue a two-year ban on the publication of Popovsky’s writing. By 1967, attitudes toward Vavilov and his rival Lysenko had sufficiently shifted that the Institute was named the N. I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources. While publicly engaged in the restoration of Vavilov’s reputation, the Soviet Union sought to suppress details about his demise. It did not want the world to know that the state had murdered a famous scientist. 

A KGB agent visited Popovsky and issued a stern warning to the writer not to communicate in conversation, lecture, or publication, the information he had obtained about Vavilov. On June 3, 1977, the KGB searched Popovsky’s apartment for his notes but they did not find them. He had already photographed his notes and distributed them among friends and colleagues both within and outside Russia revealing Vavilov's story. 

In the years that followed, Vavilov's colleague Nikolai Ivanov worked tirelessly to revive and honor his friend and teacher’s work. He worked closely with Vavilov’s widow, Yelena, to locate and collect Vavilov’s unpublished manuscripts. With this material Ivanov published three major books detailing Vavilov's account of his specimen-gathering expeditions around the world. Ivanov edited two editions of Vavilov’s biography, and two articles that recentered his research in the arena of Soviet science. 

Vavilov laid the foundations of modern plant breeding. His vision for preserving plant biodiversity was ahead of its time. These are the same principles that are being used to give us the wheat, that gives us the bread that we eat every week today. He was also motivated by the idea of trying to build up a library of seeds and plants in the event that habitat was lost. This kind of work involving the preservation of threatened types of plants was extremely important and is what so many botanical scientists and banks are involved in today. 

Varieties of wheat collected by Vavilov from Spain, Japan, Italy, and Argentina and saved by the staff of his institution were crossbred to create the winter variety Bezostaya 1,  used across the world for its high yield. Samples of a rare and disease-resistant variety of wheat collected by Vavilov in the mountain valleys of Dagestan were used by British and Australian plant breeders to develop a new, high-yielding variety. 

By 1967 a hundred million acres of Russian agricultural land had been planted with seeds derived from the Institute’s collection. By 1979 that area had almost doubled to a third of all Russia’s arable land. Today the seed bank in St. Petersburg holds more than 320,000 separate samples, a collection that has proven invaluable in ensuring food security in Russia, with more than 4,500 new and unique types of plants bred from original samples collected by Vavilov and his teams. Ninety percent of the seeds and planted crops held in the St. Petersburg collection are found in no other scientific collections in the world. 

Around the world, people continue to benefit from the sacrifice of the scientists who gave their lives during the siege of Leningrad. This story is well known to plant scientists, people who work at seed banks but outside of that small community, it's not well known at all.

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - III

Vavilov’s disappearance from the Plant Institute led to confusion. That month the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition awarded Vavilov a gold medal for services to Soviet agriculture. His colleagues couldn’t understand why the authorities would simultaneously arrest him. They wrote letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the government, and the NKVD, vouching for his character and declaring that he was no spy. But a warning came that anyone who put his or her signature to the letter would be arrested for supporting a suspected “enemy of the people."

They hoped that Vavilov’s younger brother, Sergei, director of the Optical Institute, would be able to intervene but nothing came of it. Vavilov was dismissed from his position as director of the Plant Institute. Police arrived to search his office, then his apartment. A bogus story was circulated that had he visited Ukraine with a plan to cross the border and flee to the West, taking his scientific knowledge and findings with him. Trofim Lysenko's supporters were promoted to senior positions in the Institute and Vavilov's supporters were dismissed. 

All the while, Operation Barbarossa, the German plan for the invasion of Russia, had been in full swing. Nobody had any inkling that, within three months, Leningrad — formerly known as St. Petersburg —  would become the setting for the longest siege in recorded history. Hitler told his military chief of staff that Leningrad was not merely to be attacked, but was to be leveled, to become “uninhabitable.” By razing the city, the German army would eliminate a center of Bolshevism and nationalism. Also, according to Hitler, the German army would be spared “the necessity of having to feed the population through the Winter." The siege of Leningrad lasted for almost nine hundred days. 

The tactic to besiege a city is to soften up the people living there and to stop food and supplies entering the city. Starvation and hunger began in earnest as soon as the siege ring closed. It's estimated that upwards of one million people died, four times the number that died in the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. In 1942, every third person living in the city perished. Most died from starvation. 

Vavilov had instilled in his followers a keen sense of responsibility; many of the specimens in the seed bank, he taught them, were as irreplaceable as precious artworks. They could not easily be re-collected or, in some cases, replaced at all, as the landscapes from which they had been harvested had already been destroyed by human activity. His staff understood that preserving the collection was now their primary goal. 

Although  the siege of Leningrad is very well documented, it was not known for a while because there was a state-wide cover-up to minimize the amount of casualties and the suffering that had happened in the city. But by the 1960s and 1970s the details started coming to light from people who had kept diaries. These showed what it was like throughout September, October, November of the first few months of the siege. The cupboards started to empty, as the people started to face the terrible decision of maybe butchering their pets or doing whatever it is that they needed to do in order to get some calories into their bodies to prepare for the winter. 

These diaries were by ordinary people but the botanists who worked at the Plant Institute did not keep the same kind of records. Much of the information about them comes from the things that they wrote in the years afterwards, which were much more plain, perhaps because they were government employees. But what comes through is that, throughout this ordeal, these scientists overcame hunger and injury and risked their lives to protect the world's first seed bank. They were literally starving during the siege and yet they refused to eat the very seeds they were safeguarding throughout it. 

It was a brutal winter in 1941 and more calories were needed in trying to stay alive in such cold temperatures. But the botanists made a collective decision that they're not going to touch any of the seeds. There were more than a quarter of a million seeds and plants inside the Institute in little tins. Many of them were edible. There were nuts and things that they just could have taken off the shelf and eaten on the spot which would have prolonged their lives. Instead, they gathered up the seeds and put them in two of the rooms, stacked them up, and then bolted the door shut so that no one could get in and touch them.

Some of them died while at their desks while continuing their work. One scientist was found slumped at his desk and when one of his colleagues tried to rouse him by shaking his shoulder, a packet of almonds spilled out of his hands. He had died while sorting through these almonds and cataloging them while resisting the urge to eat them and stay alive. What is it that drove the scientists to such extreme levels of self-sacrifice that resulted in the loss of life of 19 of the botanists who worked there?

They knew that some of these seeds were irreplaceable, priceless. The habitats where some of these seeds had been collected had been lost and there was no way to get them back. So eating them would have been a betrayal of that work and of their colleagues. There was a sense that this was their life's work. After the war, a journalist asked why they chose not to eat the seeds or give them to the starving people. One of the botanists said (as quoted in The Forbidden Garden):

Imagine this scenario: Here you are, a writer, who has authored a book. You’ve put your all into it — your whole life. And suddenly, let’s say, there is a severe frost, and you find yourself in a room without firewood to keep warm, only your manuscript.… Now can you begin to understand the psychology of the situation? You are freezing to death: Will you destroy this, the only copy of your book? Would you die to preserve this work? Yes, or no? Will you give in to temptation? 

What are you asking me, you and all the others? You’re surprised? You’re perplexed? Yes, it was difficult to walk at that time. It was unbearably difficult to get up every morning, move your hands and feet.… But to refrain from eating the collection? That wasn’t difficult. No, not at all. Because it was impossible to eat your life’s work, the life’s work of your friends and colleagues. Do I really need to prove such an elementary, simple thing to you?

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - II

One of Vavilov's former pupils, a peasant horticulturalist named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, followed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory that organisms could acquire traits in their lifetimes from their environments. These qualities would then be passed down to the next generation. There was no need for genetic engineering or seed banks, which, Lysenko argued, represented a waste of time and resources: one simply had to train plants to meet one’s goals, a theory he named vernalization.

Lysenko's outlier theory resonated with the country's leader, Joseph Stalin. He liked the idea that plants, like workers, could be transformed by an act of political will. Stalin also liked that, unlike Vavilov, Lysenko came from peasant stock, and that his theories did not rely on academic laboratory work. Lysenko promised Stalin that he could meet the demand for improved crop varieties within three years, seven fewer than Vavilov estimated his work required to produce results.

Stalin's policies had induced famine and he needed quick solutions. So when, at a 1935 conference, Lysenko delivered a speech in which he vilified the scientific elite and promised quick-fix solutions to the problems of Soviet food production and distribution, his message was welcomed. Vavilov followed Lysenko's work closely but suspected that he had manipulated the results of his experiments to support his ideas. But since he was supported by Stalin, Lysenko sailed past Vavilov, who was his former teacher, through the ranks of the Soviet hierarchy.

Vavilov had begun to experience powerful opposition in the late twenties itself because of Stalin's attacks on the intellectual elite. Lysenko’s arrival on the scene increased the attacks. The seed bank was increasingly viewed as a wasteful drain on the state without tangible benefit. Vavilov’s expeditions began to be viewed as little more than expensive luxury tourist trips that cost millions. 

It was Vavilov, however, whose reputation prevailed internationally. His expeditions were covered by Western journalists, and, on his travels, he befriended dignitaries and world leaders. In Stalinist Russia, to be acclaimed by so many international writers and intellectuals could soon become a problem. Vavilov suspected that his close ties to Western science had brought him under the surveillance of the Soviet security services.

Science in Stalinist Russia seemed deeply politicized. He faced criticism for hiring staff to work at the seed bank regardless of their social background and Party affiliation. In October 1937, Pravda published an editorial that claimed “[Vavilov’s] expeditions have absorbed huge amounts of people’s money. We must declare that practical value of the collection did not justify the expenses.” Stalin began to imprison intellectuals on charges of being "enemies of the state,” banishing them to labor camps to be “reeducated” in accordance with Communist principles.

Vavilov wondered for how long he could lead the Plant Institute in such an oppressive climate. He continued his work with great determination, maintaining that discipline, not politics, should inform research and scientific collaboration. At a March 1939 staff meeting he said: “We shall go to the pyre. We shall burn. But we shall not retreat from our convictions.” 

Nevertheless, the past twelve months had been trying. International fame and status had pushed Vavilov unwillingly into the shadow world of Stalin-era politics. Stress had started affecting his health. The doorman noticed how he became short of breath whenever he climbed the building’s staircase. He had become increasingly prone to fits of rage, which burned out quickly, leaving him feeling awkward and embarrassed because it was not like him. The jealousy of his peers had affected his health and led him on several occasions to attempt to resign from his position as director of the seed bank.

On August 6 1940, he was out collecting samples on a mountainside near Ukraine with some colleagues.  A black car pulled up with three shady looking characters who tell him that he was needed on urgent business in Moscow. He got into the car and left with them. But it' was a ruse because these were members of the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, and they arrest him. He was never seen again in public. 

Some months later, to everybody's surprise, Hitler broke off the nonaggression pact that he had signed with Stalin and invaded Russia. Before this,  for the first part of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied. Stalin had received a lot of warnings from his various spies that Hitler will break the pact but for whatever reason, he had chosen not to believe them. 

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - I

The Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, a botanical institute dedicated to the study of  plant life, was founded in the city of Petrograd in 1894. (The city is successively named Petrograd, Leningrad and St. Petersburg.) In March, 1921, a thirty-three-year-old man named Nikolai Vavilov, a bright young star in Russian science, was appointed as director of the penniless institute.  His dream was to turn the institute into the world’s first seed bank, a facility to store and preserve seeds for future use in agriculture, research, and conservation. 

Vavilov's inquisitiveness about the natural world drew him to biology. In 1906 he joined the Timiryazev Academy of Agriculture in Moscow. He developed a longing to see his theoretical work produce material benefits. He learned that Russian farmers reaped the poorest harvests anywhere in Europe. He knew that around half the harvest depended on the quantity of fertilizer used to feed the crop, and a quarter on the method of cultivation. The final quarter, however, depended on the quality of the seed grain. If he could improve the varieties of grain — higher yielding, better adapted, and more resistant — it might be possible for Russian farmers to improve their yields.

IN 1913 Vavilov went to England and met top geneticists there. Bateson, who had coined the term genetics just eight years earlier, had a profound influence on Vavilov's thinking. He was particularly impressed by the idea that potentially valuable wild varieties of wheat, rye, barley, and other crops had been overlooked by farmers in bygone centuries. Bateson believed these previously plants might carry invaluable genetic qualities that could be bred into today's crops.

When Vavilov arrived at Petrograd (then called Leningrad), he found out that the small collection of seeds at the Plant Institute had all but been destroyed. Looters had got into the building and eaten some of the seeds. He acquired a three-story nineteenth-century tsarist palace grand enough to house the world’s first seed bank. He collected a staff of keen, dedicated individuals committed to his vision. He took no interest in a person’s background, whether they came from peasant stock or a more well-heeled background. 

At that time, Russia was gripped by nationwide famine. WWI had led to a civil conflict that had crippled the country’s food production. Inflation, profiteering, the collapse of food supplies, and the breakdown of authority had led to a political coup that had brought to power the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Drought and crop failures worsened these human-made problems and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were now starving to death.

Everywhere conflict, natural disaster, and the destruction of habitat threatened to make certain types of plants extinct. Once destroyed, these specimens and their unique characteristics would be irretrievably lost; no amount of genetic tinkering could bring them back. The extinction of unexamined plant varieties could mean the loss of world-changing medicines, or varieties that could enable communities and nations to protect themselves against famine.

Vavilov mounted a series of expeditions to collect and catalog ancient, domesticated varieties of wheat, barley, peas, lentils, and other crops. He also sought their wild relatives, which, he reasoned, might prove useful in his experiments to breed unique varieties. He went to Iran, US, Mongolia, the Mediterranean, Italy, the Middle East, western China, Japan and many other countries in search of seeds and sent samples back to the Plant Institute to be sorted, cataloged, and stored. 

Vavilov's aim was to cross-breed different varieties of possibly overlooked crops to make supercrops, as we would term them today. So he would breed types of wheat, for example, that are disease-resistant or have a very high yield or able to withstand different climates. In twenty years, the Institute had become renowned throughout the world. The idea of a seed bank was novel, and the long-term value of a repository of genetic plant material had yet to be fully understood at the time. 

He got many prestigious awards. In Britain he was an elected member of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an honorary member of the Linnean Society of London and the Royal Horticultural Society, and of the Royal Society of Biology. In the United States he became a member of the American Geographical Society, and an honorary member of the Botanical Society of America. He was awarded honorable associations and honorary doctorates in Germany, India, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. 

By 1934, Vavilov had established more than four hundred research institutes and numerous stations around the Soviet Union. His journal, the Bulletin of Applied Botany, Genetics and Plant Breeding, had become a leading international publication in its field. Under his direction, the Soviet Union had become the world leader in plant breeding showing how countries might protect their populations from famine and starvation. 

But storm clouds were gathering.