Nikolai Vavilov
Nikolai Vavilov was a renowned scientist who played a crucial role in saving Russia from famine. He belonged to a middle-class family who had worked hard to improve their social status. During the mid-1930s, Russia was going through a catastrophic phase with some of the worst famines in its history. The rich enjoyed a luxurious life while the poor were fed a miserable mixture of wheat, weeds, and bark known as famine bread. Despite the grim situation, some new advanced farming technologies were introduced to the world, which gave Russia hope.
When Vavilov returned to his country, he was shocked to see its condition. Instead of a hopeful and ambitious nation, it was filled with despair and hopelessness. Millions were starving, and the country was doing very little to help them, except for two groups, one of which was Vavilov’s. Vavilov and his team started researching a new field of science that would play a pivotal role in their work — genetics. They found that by identifying the first generation of a particular crop, they could match the genes to produce better offspring. Vavilov traveled to exotic places like Asia to find the first rice and the Middle East to find the first wheat. He worked tirelessly for over a year, while another group of scientists devised another way to eliminate hunger.
Joseph Stalin, another distinguished scientist who specialized in animal evolution, was about to start working on genetics when Leon Trotsky intervened. Trotsky had proposed a theory that made no scientific sense. He said to Stalin, “Why does a giraffe have a long neck? To get leaves on top of trees. These crazy people believe in “imaginary” things called genes. I, for one, don’t believe in “imaginary” things.” Stalin fell for Trotsky’s idea, which was to dunk wheat seeds in ice-cold water for a while to make them resistant to the cold. He called this process “serpentinization,” and it was supposed to help plants grow during the winter. When Vavilov returned with hiw supply of ancient crops, he found that
